A dynamic view on trust: Development and consequences of trust in teams

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Isabell Welpe
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 335748286

The current proposal strives to examine the development of trust in teams and team dynamics. The data collected for a former DFG-project provide the unforeseen opportunity to examine team development from foundation until disbandment. Log-file data can be used to create proxies for psychologically meaningful constructs and examine dynamic relationships over time (Drescher et al., 2014; Drescher et al., 2011; Korsgaard et al., 2014), which have, however, to be validated with psychometric measures from surveys (Drescher et al., 2014).In the current proposal, we plan to validate these log-file proxies in order to analyze the following, so far unaddressed research questions:1. What are the dynamic relationships among antecedents of trust, trust, and consequences of trust in teams over time?2. Which factors influence the dynamic interplay between antecedents of trust, trust, and consequences of trust in teams?In specific, we plan to assess the curvilinear relationship between trustworthiness facets (ability, benevolence, integrity) and trust over time, i.e., the relative importance of each of the trustworthiness facets over the group life-cycle. Moreover, we plan to address factors moderating the relationship between shared leadership and the development of trust, e.g., the stability of the environment. In addition, we want to examine the temporal relationship between trust and both performance and turnover as well as contextual variables (such as stability of the environment and trust asymmetry) moderating this relationship.Examining these temporal dynamics is of crucial importance as trust is usually defined as an emergent construct that develops over time (de Jong & Elfring, 2010), however it is only rarely analyzed in a dynamic way (Lewicki, 2006; Pitariu & Ployhart, 2010). The studies outlined in our proposal therefore contribute to the literature on the development of trust and team dynamics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Marcus Drescher; Tanja Schwarzmüller
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Audrey Korsgaard