EDITOR'S FORUM AN INTEGRATIVE MODEL OF ORGANIZATIONAL TRUST: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE CLARIFICATIONS AND EXTENSIONS OF THE MODEL OF TRUST Trust As an Aspect of a Relationship (original) (raw)
A considerable amount of research has examined trust since our 1995 publication. We revisit some of the critical issues that we addressed and provide clarifications and extensions of the topics of levels of analysis, time, control systems, reciprocity, and measurement. We also recognize recent research in new areas of trust, such as affect, emotion, violation and repair, distrust, international and cross-cultural issues, and context-specific models, and we identify promising avenues for future research. As we wrote our 1995 paper on trust (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995), we were struck by the relative scarcity of research in the mainstream management literature focusing directly on trust. This led us to several bodies of literature , including management, psychology, philosophy , and economics. We found that scholars from diverse disciplines were presenting many insightful views and perspectives on trust but that many of them seemed to talk past one another. Our goal was to integrate these perspectives into a single model. This work came to fruition at about the same time as several other works on trust. Papers on trust by Hosmer (1995) and McAllister (1995) were also published in Academy of Management journals that year, followed the next year by a book edited by Kramer and Tyler (1996). The con-fluence of these works, fueled by practical concerns raised by now infamous government and corporate scandals over the next decade, produced a groundswell of interest in understanding this basic and ubiquitous construct. Since we were drawing perspectives from multiple disciplines as inputs to the model, we wanted to provide a model that was generally applicable and would be used across multiple disciplines. We were gratified to find in a recent search that our paper has been cited over 1,100 times (according to Google Scholar). In addition to management and general business, it has been cited in such diverse areas as marketing, sociology, health care, and agribusiness. We would like to use this opportunity to revisit some of the issues raised by our 1995 paper and review how the field has dealt with them. We will also discuss the new concerns and opportunities for future research on trust.