Trust (social science)
Management and organization science

In management and organization science, trust is studied as a factor which organizational actors can manage and influence. Scholars have researched how trust develops across individual and organizational levels of analysis. They suggest a reciprocal process in which organizational structures influence people's trust and, at the same time, people's trust manifests in organizational structures. Trust is also one of the conditions of an organizational culture that supports knowledge sharing. An organizational culture that supports knowledge sharing allows employees to feel secure and comfortable to share their knowledge, their work, and their expertise. Structure often creates trust in a person, and this encourages them to feel comfortable and excel in the workplace; it makes an otherwise stressful environment manageable.

Management and organization science scholars have also studied how trust is influenced by contracts and how trust interacts with formal mechanisms. Scholars in management and related disciplines have also made a case for the importance of distrust as a related but distinct construct. Similarly scholars have assessed the relationship between monitoring and trust, for example in a trust game context, and in shareholder -management relations.

Since the mid-1990s, organizational research has followed two distinct but nonexclusive paradigms of trust research:

Together, these paradigms predict how different dimensions of trust form in organizations by demonstrating various trustworthiness attributes.
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