Recent theoretical developments have enabled the empirical study of trust for specific referents in organizations. The authors conducted a 14-month field study of employee trust for top management. A 9-month quasi-experiment found that the implementation of a more acceptable performance appraisal system increased trust for top management. The 3 proposed factors of trustworthiness (ability, benevolence, and integrity) mediated the relationship between perceptions of the appraisal system and trust.

Recognition of the importance of trust in organizations has grown dramatically in recent years, evidenced by an abundance of published work attempting to understand the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. Trust for employees (Whitney, 1994), trust for management (Mishra, 1996; Robinson, 1996), and interorganizational trust (Gulati, 1995) have all been examined in recent scholarly literature. Many more works have suggested that trust is very important to other phenomena, such as group process and negotiation, without delving into the nature of trust and how it develops.

There is some evidence that suggests that trust levels for management in many organizations are declining (Farnam, 1989). Some researchers have suggested that organizations routinely violate what the employees believe are the employers’ obligations, leading to a general erosion of trust for employers (Robinson & Rousseau, 1994). Because trust is so difficult to build (Tyler & Degoey, 1995) and so poorly understood, some authors have suggested legalistic remedies to protect an organization from opportunistic employee behaviors (e.g., Sitkin & Bies, 1994). Argyris (1964) theorized that trust for management is tied to important productivity-related outcomes. Given this, it is important for both theoretical and practical reasons to understand how to build trust for management.

The effective use...