Systems of People / Trust / Research on Trust
Research on Trust
One of the most studied concepts in the social sciences, and what that research means in practice.
Trust has been examined by psychologists, economists, sociologists, neuroscientists, political scientists, and organizational researchers, each asking a different question and finding a different piece of the answer.
The breadth of that inquiry is itself part of the point. Trust is not a soft idea. It is a foundational condition of human cooperation, and the research treating it as such goes back decades.
A brief history
Serious academic study of trust accelerated in the 1970s and grew significantly through the 1980s and 1990s.
1970s
Trust as a personal trait
Early researchers focused primarily on trust as an individual psychological trait, asking whether some people were simply more disposed to trust than others. Scholars associated trust and distrust with an individual's expression of confidence in the intentions and motives of others. Julian Rotter's work on generalized trust as a personality disposition remains foundational.
1988 and 1995
Trust meets economics and civic life
Diego Gambetta's 1988 edited volume Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations and Francis Fukuyama's 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity both brought trust into conversation with economics, social capital, and civic life, setting the agenda for later research on trust and economic development.
1995
The most influential model
Roger Mayer, James Davis, and F. David Schoorman published An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust in the Academy of Management Review. Their framework, identifying ability, integrity, and benevolence as the three components of trustworthiness, remains among the most cited in the field and maps closely to the transactional and relational trust distinction used in this work.
2000
Trust and community health
Robert Putnam's work on declining civic participation widened the frame, connecting individual trust to the health of communities and democratic institutions. For Putnam, the core claim was one of the demise of social capital, which included declining social trust.
The diversity of fields
No single discipline can claim to have covered this topic in its entirety. A few of the most relevant fields for organizational and leadership contexts:
Field
Psychology
How trust forms between individuals, how it is affected by personality and prior experience, and how it is repaired after violation.
Field
Organizational behaviour
The Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman model, and a substantial body of research on how trust affects performance, cooperation, knowledge sharing, and organizational outcomes.
Field
Neuroscience
Research by Kosfeld and colleagues in 2005 identified oxytocin as a neurochemical driver of trust behaviour. The willingness to trust others has measurable biological correlates.
Field
Economics
Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe's 1995 investment game studies demonstrated that trust and reciprocity function as behavioural instincts, not merely calculated strategies.
Field
Sociology and political science
Why some societies and organizations are more trusting than others, and what the consequences are for democratic participation, civic life, and collective action.
Important recent additions
Three areas that matter most for leaders right now.
Psychological safety
The closest adjacent construct to relational trust in current research. Amy Edmondson defined team psychological safety in a 1999 study as the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Google's Project Aristotle later identified it as the top predictor of team performance, and her book The Fearless Organization is the most accessible entry point.
Psychological safety is centrally tied to learning behaviour, while trust lowers transaction costs and reduces the need to monitor behaviour. They are related but distinct, and understanding the difference matters for leaders.
Trust in remote and hybrid work
Without casual hallway conversations and in-person social cues, leaders must work more intentionally to create connection and invite participation. The research consensus is that relational trust, built on care and genuine connection, becomes more important, not less, when people work at a distance. Carelessness is also more costly in distributed environments, where small signals of inattention are amplified.
Institutional trust decline
Long-running surveys, including Edelman's annual Trust Barometer and the World Values Survey, have documented sustained declines in trust in institutions across many countries over the past two decades. When institutional trust erodes externally, the pressure on internal relational trust increases, particularly in mission-driven sectors where staff expect organizational values to be enacted, not merely stated.
What the research agrees on
Trust is built through patterns of behaviour, not declarations of intent. It is easier to lose than to build. The components of trustworthiness, ability, integrity, and care, are each necessary but not individually sufficient. Trust has measurable effects on cooperation, performance, and resilience, and it shapes how people interpret ambiguous information.
Trust also reduces coordination costs. Chami and Fullenkamp demonstrate this formally: trusting firms spend less effort monitoring each other and more effort on productive work.
What the research leaves open
The literature remains fragmented, with little consensus regarding trust's origins. Trust is notoriously difficult to measure reliably, and most studies rely on self-reported survey data. Findings from one sector or culture do not always transfer cleanly to another.
Mission-driven sectors, including not-for-profits, healthcare, education, and government, are understudied relative to corporate environments. That gap is where much of the applied work in this practice sits.
Further reading
Where to start if you want to go to the source.
- Mayer, R.C., Davis, J.H., and Schoorman, F.D. (1995). An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709-734.
- Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
- Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. Free Press.
- Gambetta, D. (Ed.) (1988). Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Blackwell.
- Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon and Schuster.
- Edmondson, A.C. (2018). The Fearless Organization. Wiley.
- Schilke, O., Reimann, M., and Cook, K.S. (2021). Trust in Social Relations. Annual Review of Sociology, 47, 239-259.
- Chami, R. and Fullenkamp, C. (2002). Trust and Efficiency. Journal of Banking and Finance, 26(9), 1785-1809.
More on trust
The research explains why trust matters. The other pages in the Trust hub explain how it works in practice.
- Trust in Systems of People
- What is Trust?
- How Trust Forms, Erodes, and Repairs
- Research on Trust
Other knowledge hubs: Care Community and Belonging coming soon All of Systems of People
Bring this to your team
This is one piece of a larger framework I teach live. If your team is working through trust in practice, not just in theory, The Foundations of Culture workshop is built to work through exactly this, together.
“I can’t imagine a single team of people who wouldn’t benefit from these workshops.”
