Consistency at different levels: A meta-analytic examination of organizational trust and performance
Nankai Business Review International
ISSN: 2040-8749
Article publication date: 7 April 2020
Issue publication date: 23 November 2020
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to answer following three important but not well-answered or unanswered questions in the extant trust literatures: What is the true magnitude that trust impacts on performance? Is there any consistency among the effects of trust on performance at different levels? How does vertical distance affect the trust-performance relationship?
Design/methodology/approach
It captures the law between trust and performance at different levels by conducting a meta-analytic examination consisting of 238 independent empirical studies, 586 effect sizes and 110,576 independent samples.
Findings
It makes a periodic conclusion that trust significantly promotes performance. Specifically, trust not only has stronger positive correlation with team performance than individual and organizational performance inside organization, but also strongly facilitates organizational performance between organizations. Moreover, consistency exits in the effects of trust on performance at different levels. On one hand, trust has stronger positive correlation with performance of contextual type than performance of innovative type than performance of task type at different levels. On the other hand, promotion effect of trust on performance strengthens when the vertical distance between trustors and trustees diminishes. Additionally, three potential moderators including publication status, measurement tool and common method variance moderate the focused relation, but moderating effect is not thorough for regional culture. Moderating directions of the above four potential moderators are highly consistent.
Originality/value
This paper answers the three important but not well-answered or unanswered questions.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are indebted to Dr Hongzhi Chen in Business School, Nanjing University. This research was supported by the grants funded by Chinese National Funding of Social Sciences (Grant 14BGL076 and 18BGL126) and 100 Young Excellent Scholars Foundation of Guangdong University of Technology (Grant 220413736).
Citation
Su, T.S., Chen, C., Cui, X., Yang, C. and Ma, W. (2020), "Consistency at different levels: A meta-analytic examination of organizational trust and performance", Nankai Business Review International, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 537-567. https://doi.org/10.1108/NBRI-01-2020-0005
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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