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Examining the ways in which affect impacts the trust that develops between members of dissimilar groups broadens the study of trust development. People's perceptions of their own interdependence with other groups influence both their beliefs about group members' trustworthiness and their affect for group members. I propose that this affect, in turn, influences interpersonal trust development through multiple paths: cognitive, motivational, and behavioral. Using literature on social information processing, emotion, and intergroup behavior, I elucidate the social and affective context of trust development.
Interpersonal trust is an important social resource that can facilitate cooperation and enable coordinated social interactions (Blau, 1964; Coleman, 1988; Zucker, 1986). It reduces the need to monitor others' behavior, formalize procedures, and create completely specified contracts (Macauley, 1963; Powell, 1990). Because trust facilitates informal cooperation and reduces negotiation costs, it is invaluable to organizations that depend on cross-functional teams, interorganizational partnerships, temporary work-- groups, and other cooperative structures to coordinate work (e.g., Creed & Miles, 1996; Powell, 1990; Ring & Van de Ven, 1994).
In today's flatter organizations, jobs often require cooperation across boundaries, such as functional areas, divisions, and management-- versus-union lines. People are continually asked to cross group boundaries to secure cooperation from individuals over whom they have no hierarchical control. However, it is often difficult to develop trust and cooperation across group boundaries, because people frequently perceive individuals from other groups as potential adversaries with conflicting goals, beliefs, or styles of interacting (e.g., Fiske & Ruscher, 1993; Kramer, 1991; Kramer & Messick, 1998; Sitkin & Roth, 1993). Even when there is no tension among groups, people in organizations often interact with individuals from other groups as though those individuals were representatives of their respective groups (Kramer, 1991; Labianca, Brass, & Gray, 1998). And when individuals are viewed as representatives of a social group, interpersonal and intergroup interactions fuse such that the affect and beliefs associated with that social group influence interpersonal interactions with specific group members (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990).
Such fusion is likely to influence trust development, because beliefs about trustworthiness are often associated with social group membership. For instance, people usually hold positive perceptions of fellow group members' trustworthiness and exhibit cooperative behavior toward them (e.g., Brewer, 1979; Brewer & Kramer, 1985; Kramer & Brewer,...