Content area
Full Text
INTRODUCTION
The study of trust has received considerable attention from organizational scholars (see Kramer, 1999). Studies have investigated trust at various levels, including trust between an individual and his or her supervisor (eg, Cook and Wall, 1980; Mayer and Davis, 1999), peers (eg, McAllister, 1995), department (eg, Cummings and Bromiley, 1996) and trust in an organization as a whole (eg, Robinson and Rousseau, 1994). A consistent theme among these studies is that they conceptualize trust as targeting a specific referent (eg, one specific corporation). Little attention has been paid, however, to general trust/distrust in all corporations (ie, as institutions). That is, researchers have neglected people's attitudes toward organizations as a collective - what we refer to as corporate distrust. We focus on the negative aspect of trust because people rarely express feelings of trust in corporations as institutions. It is, however, common to hear expressions such as 'evil corporations' or 'prophets of profit'. Studying corporate distrust merits attention because these beliefs may shape impressions people form of specific organizations (eg, organizational reputation) or they may influence behaviors affecting organizations such as job hopping, investing in stock, or purchasing products or services.
In this article we draw upon research on interpersonal trust to develop a theory of how stakeholders develop distrust of corporations. We discuss the relevance of this attitude to existing organizational theories and empirically test relations with dispositional variables that may be related to corporate distrust.
DEFINITIONS OF TRUST
A review of the literature on trust reveals a lack of consensus among scholars who try to define it (eg, Barber, 1983; Hosmer, 1995; Lewicki and Bunker, 1995; Shapiro, 1987). We review two perspectives of interpersonal trust that help lay a foundation for a theory of corporate distrust: (1) a psychological perspective emphasizing trust as a set of expectations about the trustworthiness of people in general, and (2) a moral perspective that expands on what those expectations entail.
The Psychological Perspective
The classic psychological approach to trust defines it as a disposition or attitude that shapes expectations about behavior. For example, Rotter (1967) defined trust as 'an expectancy held by an individual or a group that the word, promise, verbal or written statement of another individual or group could be relied upon' (p. 650). Erikson's...