Effects of Group Trust Dynamics on Intra-organizational Communication Dynamics

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 15. Public and Non-Profit Organizations and Social Enterprise

Abstract

Trust serves an important purpose in organizations composed of numerous, specialized, interdependent roles. Supporting confidence that individuals will dutifully fulfill the responsibilities of those roles without causing harm to the organization, trust enables coordinated task execution across multiple roles without excessive monitoring and interference. Although trust contributes to a variety of organizational processes and outcomes, we know little about trust dynamics within organizations. Interactions play an important role in shaping and updating trust, and scholars of group trust have called for increased attention to how communication networks shape trust. In this paper, we simultaneously address these two gaps by examining the coevolution of communication networks and trust. We measure individual perceptions of trust in various organizational sub-groups several times over the span of a multi-day training exercise for a military organization that largely focuses on collecting, analyzing, and acting on information gleaned from their operating environment. Using static and dynamic network models on the organization's email communication logs, we assess the relationship between trust and communication networks. We find that when individuals report elevated trust in a group, they become more likely to form and sustain ties to members of that group during the next time period. To a lesser extent, they also increase their rates of communication to those group members. When examining whether this process works in reverse, in which communication to group members is followed by increased ratings of trust in that group, we find limited and conflicting evidence. These findings suggest temporal directionality regarding how trust and communication co-evolve.

Authors

• Sean M. Fitzhugh, U.S. Army Research Laboratory

• Cynthia K. Maupin, University of Georgia

• Arwen DeCostanza, U.S. Army Research Laboratory