Towards a Framework of Trust Attribution Styles

Abstract

The issue of trust has attracted considerable business and management inquiry over the last decade, due to its impact on working relationships within and between organizations. Given its importance, it is fundamental for management to be able to foster trust and thus necessary to accurately diagnose the current state of trust in their organization. However, diagnosing trust in real contexts is challenging due to its taboo and tacit nature. Hence, a surreptitious approach to data gathering and analysis may be required to elicit honest accounts from participants about trust. This paper contends that attribution theory can provide the basis for the development of such an analytical framework by enabling researchers to analyse field data about organizational life. The paper presents literature that highlights the appropriateness of attribution style analysis for explaining trust. It presents a taxonomy of trust‐related terms, and proposes a framework of distinct attribution patterns for each term to systematize the diagnosis of trust in situ. The paper concludes with a discussion about the value of the framework for trust research and directions for future work.

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