TDLR

The “Trust development in leadership relationships” project examines how trust relationships between leaders and followers develop, deteriorate, and rebuild. It is an essential project because: organizations are based on leader-follower relationships; these relationships demand research investigation; trust is fundamental to the relationship; and we therefore need to understand how trust is developed, violated, and restored. Only relatively recently have organizational scholars begun to examine leadership from the point of view of the relationship in depth. Nevertheless, there are rich determinants to relationship quality that have not been examined and certainly not fully understood in the leadership literature. This proposal contributes to the leadership and trust literatures and builds on work already done by the research team by focussing specifically on the role of trust in the relationship between leaders and subordinates. A series of studies using multiple methods to examine how trust develops in leadership relationships comprise the project. The theoretical framework is based on trust and leadership theory and the research will explore how trust develops and specifically how people react to violations of trust. The team has already made substantial progress toward identifying how trust is violated in the leader-follower relationship and has developed an inductive model from a qualitative study. That model has identified two central types of trust violation: dashed expectations and abuse of power. Dashed expectations offer a possibility of recovering the trust whereas trust violations based on an abuse of power offer little possibility of recovery. The present project uses qualitative, survey, and experimental research methods to test the model, and therefore requires a team of researchers versed in various methods and areas of specialization. The leader of this project is Caroline Manville (Assistant professor, University Toulouse 1-Capitole, France) who will be supported by Steven Grover (Professor, University of Otago, New Zealand), Markus Hasel (Assistant professor, EMLyon, France), Carolina Serrano-Archimi (Assistant professor, University Aix-Marseille, France), Karim Abdul Khan (Assistant professor, Suleman Dawood School of Business, Pakistan), Samina Quratulain (Assistant professor, Lahore University, Pakistan) and Marie-Aude Dupont (PhD student, University Aix-Marseille, France).