Conference proceeding
Maintaining Trust Through Active Meaning Construction
Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, Vol.2016(1), pp.440-445
01/2016
DOI: 10.5465/ambpp.2016.286
Abstract
Despite the growing body of research on the importance of repairing trust when it is damaged, processes related to maintaining trust have remained largely unexamined. We argue that trust maintenance is often a purposive activity filled with intentionality and agency. We examine trust maintenance as a meaning-construction process and explore it as an ongoing endeavor in which trustees (i.e., individuals to be trusted) play an active role. We integrate and delineate a unified set of trust-relevant processes that include sensemaking, perspective taking, sensemaintaining, sensebreaking and sensegiving. We propose that these active meaning-construction processes are core interpersonal approaches that allow trustees to mitigate potential challenges to maintaining trust. We assert that trustees seek to proactively understand and influence others’ expectations for trustworthy behavior as well as take steps to avoid misunderstandings, disrupt negative biases and mitigate the impact of their own harmful behavior. Our model calls into question the assumption that underlies current thinking on trust maintenance, i.e., that trust is primarily maintained through a relatively passive process of trustees behaving in a characteristically trustworthy manner and brings individual agency back into the trust maintenance process.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Maintaining Trust Through Active Meaning Construction
- Creators
- Michele Williams - Cornell UniversityLiuba Y. Belkin - Lehigh University
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, Vol.2016(1), pp.440-445
- DOI
- 10.5465/ambpp.2016.286
- eISSN
- 2151-6561
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/2016
- Academic Unit
- Management and Entrepreneurship
- Record Identifier
- 9984380514302771
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