Multilevel Trust in Organizations: Theoretical, Analytical, and Empirical Advances Edited by AshleyFulmer and KurtDirks, New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor &amp; Francis Group, 2020, 124 pages, $128.00 hardcover

Multilevel Trust in Organizations: Theoretical, Analytical, and Empirical Advances (hereafter referred to as “Multilevel Trust in Organizations”) was the perfect short read in between the fall semester and spring semester winter break. In other terms, a week of evening reading is sufficient to cover the content at a comfortable pace. There are just five chapters within the text that were originally five journal articles published in the special edition of the Journal of Trust Research (Impact Score = 2.36) in October 2018 (Volume 8, Issue 2). The publication date of the book is 2020, so I was not expecting that the publication date of the research in the book (and correct citation for the research) to be two years prior, though I am not entirely certain that those two years matter significantly. Given that the book is a compilation of journal articles that may be easily accessible to readers, the $128.00 price tag for the book may be a bit steep, especially as at least one of the articles is open access. However, as noted by the editors in their introduction, the point of the book is to bring existing research on trust in organizations at varying levels of analysis to one cohesive point, which is accomplished by this text. I opted to read Multilevel Trust in Organizations due to my professional interest in organizational trust. I had hoped to pick up some information that could be useful for my own research and there is much to choose from in the brief 124 pages. Allow me to now provide you with a review of the book and you can draw your own conclusions about the usefulness of the content. As for myself, I generally enjoyed reading several of the articles featured in Multilevel Trust in Organizations and learned quite a bit from it. The primary audience for this book is likely in the field of Academia. Several of the articles were only theoretical or case-study based, which is not the best for drawing broad conclusions or to inform organizational interventions. While it is possible to identify the applications of the articles, the majority of the articles did not appear focused on pragmatic usage by practitioners. The book begins with an introduction from the editors. The editors emphasize the value of understanding organizational trust from multiple levels of analysis and encourage readers and researchers to move away from single evaluations of specific facets of organizational trust. For instance, rather than examining the trust between supervisor and subordinate as a simple and direct relational exchange, organizational trust research must also consider personality dispositions, historical influences, institutional and personal values, societal factors, etc. within that relationship. The editors assure the reader that the move to a multilevel organizational trust framework is both a theoretical imperative and a practical necessity, as organizations adapt and adjust to changes in the environment and advances in technology. The editors go on to describe the five articles included “[i]n this special issue.” To this effect, I could not tell if the editors’ introduction to the book was the same one that was published in the special issue of the Journal of Trust Research, as I do not have access to this journal and could not verify. After providing a brief overview of each of the five articles in the book, the editors go on to discuss three themes that were identified from the research which included 1) temporal dynamics, 2) contextual variations, and 3) fluidity between people and place. The editors provide narrative and evidence to support their conclusions that these themes are present in the research and are relevant to the reader's consideration. Following the editors’ introduction, the first of the five articles is presented. “Conceptualizing time as a level of analysis: New directions in the analysis of trust dynamics” was written by Korsgaard, Kautz, Bliese, Samson, and Kostyszyn. The authors of this article use a growth model to better understand and predict trajectories of trust as trust is built, dissolved, and recovered over time. I appreciated this fluctuating conceptualization of trust and believe it did successfully impart a new and dynamic perspective with which to view trust in organizations. The next article, “Trust development processes in intra-organizational relationships: A multi-level permeation of trust in a merging university” written by Karhapää and Savolainen, highlighted the use of an integrative model to better understand a business merger and its impact on organizational trust across the span of 17 years. Trust permeation was qualitatively studied at varying levels (person, group, and organization) in this single-case study which was an interesting venture outside of my usual scope of reading. “Contextualizing the coevolution of (dis)trust and control—a longitudinal case study of a public market” was written by Högberg, Sköld, and Tillmar and utilized the critical incident technique to examine the coevolution of trust, distrust, and control across the span of seven years. An in-depth literature review on trust-control dynamics was also conducted and represented in an appendix table. Like the previous article, this article was also a qualitative case study with a focus on relationships between a Swedish municipality and private sector organizations. Data for the article “Job insecurity, employee anxiety, and commitment: The moderating role of collective trust in management” by Wang, Mather, and Seifert came from the 2011 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) which resulted in a huge sample (N = 16,574). The authors used moderated mediation modeling to determine that while perceived job insecurity was related to greater employee stress and lower commitment, collective trust in management helped attenuate these negative effects. There are obvious implications and applications to this particular study that I/O psychology practitioners would benefit from. Finally, the last article “Trust development across levels of analysis: An embedded-agency perspective” was a theoretical piece written by Lumineau and Schilke. The authors wrote on the reciprocal relationship between the organization and the individual in terms of building trust; the cross-level model addressed both a top-down and bottom-up approach. The authors call for experimental research to test the model. Multilevel Trust in Organizations provides a broad range of research on organizational trust, ranging from topics such as issues of trust dynamics, collective trust in management, the process of developing trust in the workplace, moderators for organizational trust, and the interaction of trust, distrust, and control. However, with some exceptions, the book is mostly limited in practical application. A strength of the book lies in the diverse and international perspectives of the researchers, who work and study in the United States, Sweden, Finland, Poland, and the UK. However, even with the wide diversity of contributor demographics, the book provides only Western-based authors’ understanding of multilevel organizational trust, so there are perspectives missing from other cultural domains. A weakness of the book is that due to the nature of it being five journal articles put together, there is no logical organization or transition between chapters (articles) and no unifying conclusion. Ultimately, I feel that organizational trust is an important topic that is valued by readers of Personnel Psychology. The book Multilevel Trust in Organizations may answer some questions you have pertaining to the subject while leaving others unanswered. But I will let you be the judge of that!