Does trust encourage or discourage employees to share their suggestions? Research suggests the answer depends on the “types” of trust being measured.
The positive effects of employees’ trust in their supervisors have been widely documented, such as job engagement, performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Given supervisors’ authority in the workplace, we suspect supervisors would bear a critical role in initiating trusting supervisor-employee relationships. As suggested in the social exchange theory, employees may perceive supervisor trust in them as a kind act by the supervisor and feel obligated to return such a kind act with their trust in supervisor. The Research To examine the relationships among (supervisor) trust in employee, (employee) felt trust, and (employee) trust in supervisor with empirical data, I worked with Drs. Yung-Kuei Huang at National Ilan University in Taiwan and Ning-Kuang Chuang at Kent State University on a project. Our purpose is two-fold. 1. To examine the mediating relationships among trust in employee, felt trust, and trust in supervisor with two-dimensional measu