Abstract
For organizations, the trust of their stakeholders is of enormous significance because it is the basis on which organizations are able to achieve their objectives in the long run in a modern, differentiated society. The public perception of organizations and their products also depends heavily on the assessment of their trustworthiness. It is therefore all the more surprising that questions concerning what stakeholder trust in organizations actually is and how it can be measured have so far only been sparsely addressed in communication science. In the present contribution, trust in organizations is conceptualized with reference to sociological theories of trust, among other ideas. According to these theories, trust is a mechanism that makes the risk perceived by stakeholders in their relationships with organizations tolerable. Following the model by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, which originates from organizational psychology, trust in organizations is significantly based on their perceived trustworthiness. The empirical analysis of the factors of the perceived trustworthiness of organizations is performed with reference to the example of political parties and non-governmental organizations. The results illustrate the significance of organizational trustworthiness for the relevant organizations and provide valuable implications for organizational practice. The contribution also sheds light on the methodological challenges associated with measuring the trustworthiness of organizations and looks at the resultant challenges for interdisciplinary trust research.
The following observations are primarily based on the studies by Wiencierz (2016) and by Wiencierz et al. (2015).
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- 1.
Luhmann (2005, pp. 13–14, translated from the German) provides the following definition of organizations: “We can describe as being organized those social systems which link membership to specific conditions, that is, which make entrance and exit dependent on conditions. It is assumed that the behavioral requirements of the system and the behavioral motives of the members can vary independently of each other but can, under certain circumstances, be linked together to form relatively long-lasting constellations. With the help of such membership rules […] it becomes possible, in spite of voluntarily chosen and shifting membership, to reproduce highly artificial modes of behavior over a relatively long stretch of time.”
- 2.
Kohring (2004, pp. 122–123) stresses that the focus of an empirical examination of trust must be placed on the expectations of the trustors and not on the preconditions. According to this view, trust describes a relation between social actors and not an assessment of certain (learnable) characteristics of the object of trust by the trustor. In this contribution, the characteristics of the object of trust will nevertheless be taken into consideration because the expectations have to be formed by the stakeholders beforehand and the possible actions of the object of trust have to be anticipated accordingly. Anticipation of the possible actions of the object of trust is, however, only possible if its characteristics are assessed at a previous stage.
- 3.
Giddens (1991, p. 83) uses the concept of the “calculation” of benefits and risks in this context. This concept was replaced by that of assessment in order to avoid the impression of describing a theory of trust that is based on rational choice theory.
- 4.
However, direct contact with access points is not always necessary or possible in order to be able to assess the trustworthiness of an abstract system or in order to be able to form trust in that system. For these purposes, information from the mass media and from personal contacts can also be taken into account (Coleman 1990, pp. 180–185; Giddens 1991, pp. 90–91).
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Wiencierz, C., Röttger, U. (2016). Trust in Organizations: The Significance and Measurement of Trust in Corporate Actors. In: Blöbaum, B. (eds) Trust and Communication in a Digitized World. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28059-2_5
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