Trusted Voices: How Employees Generalize Trust to Other Departments and Transfer Group Trust

Trust in other departments is important for cross-unit collaboration as it helps employees to quickly form effective working relationships with others whom they do not know well or with whom they have not worked previously. Our field social network study of individuals’ trust in other departments in a project-based global design and advanced manufacturing firm has three main findings. First, we find that trust is generalized from employees’ direct trust relationships with known members of another department to the department as a whole. Second, that trust generalization is moderated by formal workflow dependence, such that an employee’s trust in another department is determined most strongly by department members whom they depend on highly for work inputs, but in whom they lack trust. Third, that trust in other departments is transferred indirectly via relationships with trusted colleagues who themselves trust the judged department. Our paper advances understanding of trust as an organizing principle by elucidating the roles of trust generalization and group trust transfer, as well as the interplay between formal and informal organization in determining trust in other organizational groups.