The Integrative Model of Organizational Trust as a framework for understanding trust in government
Year: 2014

In this paper, we examine the applicability of Mayer, Schoorman, and Davis' 1995 Integrative Model of Organizational Trust for modeling citizens' trust in their government. We assess this via an empirical evaluation using country level 2010 survey data collected in four Western Trans Sahel countries (Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, and Nigeria) Our fundamental result is that the data and analyses support the Mayer et al. model, though our results also suggest some modifications. In particular, we find that there are two separate dimensions to ability and benevolence/integrity, and our models suggest the existence of a new factor in models of government trust that we hypothesize is related to government reputation. TRUST IN GOVERNMENT 3& Exploring the Integrative Model of Organizational Trust as a Framework for Understanding Trust in Government Multiple social science perspectives state that trust is critical to human interaction. For example, psychologists suggest "trust is one of the most important components and perhaps the most essential ingredient for the development and maintenance of wellfunctioning relationships" (Simpson, 2007a, p. 587) Similarly, commentators from the field of international relations have stated that trust within the international system is "the underpinning of all human contact and institutional interaction" (Blind, 2006, p. 3) Organizational management perspectives reach a similar conclusion about the cross disciplinary importance of trust studies (e.g. Colquitt, Scott LePine, 2007) Even American military perspectives from the counterinsurgency battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that generating trust between American service members and local populations is more important than kinetics and force. For example, David Kilcullen, the noted Australian counterinsurgency expert states, trust building is the military's "true main effort: everything else is secondary" (Kilcullen, 2010, p. 37) This manuscript is the first to explore the utility of Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman's (1995) Integrative Model of Organizational Trust for understanding citizen trust in government. Mayer et al.'s Integrative Model of Organizational Trust has been used to explain interpersonal trust outcomes in the business world (Davis, Schoorman, Mayer, Tan, 2000) the medical community (Schoorman, Mayer, Davis, 1996) psychology (Simpson, 2007a, b) and others (Colquitt, et al. 2007) Despite the overwhelming utility of the Mayer model for understanding interpersonal trust generation in multiple contexts, it has, to our knowledge, never been used to understand citizen trust in government. This is surprising since Mayer and colleagues (e.g. Schoorman et al. 2007) claim that their model is robust for understanding an individual's trust in TRUST IN GOVERNMENT 4& organizations, though they tend to think of trust in business organizations as opposed to governments. As Mayer and colleagues noted, "the 1995 framework is fairly robust across levels of analysis" (Schoorman et al. 2007, p. 345) From their perspective, the same variables that impact trust between people "also affect the extent to which an organization will be trusted" by people (Schoorman et al. 2007, p. 345) This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we describe Mayer et al.'s Integrative Model of Organizational Trust and how elements of the framework can be applied to understanding citizen trust in government. We also discuss existing research on trust in government that, despite not using the Mayer model as an organizing framework, appears to support the Mayer et al. concept. Subsequently, we describe an exploratory analysis of survey data from four countries in the Trans Sahel region of Africa (Senegal, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Mali) In this section, we first describe basic details of each nation surveyed followed by our analysis of whether the Integrative Model of Organizational Trust is appropriate for understanding citizen reports of trust in government. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of our results and recommendations for future research.  Multiple theoretical frameworks, across disciplines, attempt to explain how trust is generated. For example, Wieselquist et al. (1999) propose a trust generation theory based in psychology, often used to explain trust in romantic relationships, that explains how trust is generated between two people. Simpson (2007a, 2007b) proposes a dyadic theory of trust generation that focuses on the impact of personality variables across multiple stages of the trust generation process. Hardin (2006) proposes a view based in political philosophy that helps explain how people have developed trust across time. Combs and Blincoe (2013) have proposed TRUST IN GOVERNMENT 5& a new theoretical framework specifically designed to understand how trust is generated cross culturally, with an aim towards understanding trust on the battlefield. While each of these trust models is useful, perhaps the most celebrated social science model of trust generation is Mayer et al.'s now classic Integrative Model of Organizational Trust (Mayer, Davis Schoorman, 1995) Developed in the mid 1990's to organize a very disjointed social sciences trust literature, Mayer et al.'s model has now received extensive supporting empirical treatment and, by 2007, has been cited over a thousand times (Schoorman, Mayer Davis, 2007) Integrative Model of Organizational Trust In 1995 Mayer and colleagues introduced their Integrative Model of Organizational Trust. Trust, from Mayer et al.'s perspective, is "the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party" (Mayer et al. 1995, p. 712) According to their framework, as shown in Figure 1, trust is a result of trustworthiness. Trustworthiness, in this case, is a function of the trustor's (the person doing the trusting) perceptions of the trustee's (the person who would be trusted) ability, benevolence, and integrity (each explained in more detail in the next subsection) These components of trustworthiness, along with a person's dispositional propensity to trust, theoretically predict the level of trust a trustor has in a trustee. The Mayer et al. model is a feedback loop, where trust is tested in a risk taking situation, an outcome is observed, and then the trustor's assessment of the trustee is subsequently updated. Mayer et al.'s model was originally proposed to explain trust in business relationships. For example, the process in Figure 1 was designed to explain when an employee might trust a TRUST IN GOVERNMENT 6& supervisor. If the employee perceives the supervisor as having sufficient ability, benevolence, and integrity then the employee is more likely to trust the supervisor and be willing to be vulnerable to his or her direction, leadership, etc. Components and Definitions Within the Integrative Model of Organizational Trust As noted, Mayer et al. (1995, p. 717) suggest that trustworthiness is made up of ability, benevolence, and integrity. This section characterizes each of these trustworthiness elements and provides research examples indicating that each has an impact on trust in government. The section concludes with a brief example of how the overall framework could play out regarding trust in government. Mayer et al. (p. 717) define ability as "that group of skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable a party to have influence within some specific domain." Essentially, ability is a trustor's perception of a person or organization's ability to successfully complete a task. The impact of this trustworthiness component on trust makes intuitive sense. A trustor would not be willing to make themselves vulnerable to the actions of a trustee if the trustee is incompetent to achieve some relevant task. Of course, as Combs and Blincoe (2013, p. 13) note, "ability varies from domain to domain and situation to situation." At a personal trust level, an auto mechanic might be very good at repairing domestic cars, but have little background with foreign cars. As such, a trustor's sense of a trustee's ability to repair his or her car will clearly vary across situations, as will a trustor's overall trust in the trustee. From an organizational standpoint, the degree to which a person believes a business or government is trustworthy, and therefore trusts the business or government, should also depend on the ability of the organization in question. For example, trust in an auto manufacturer is probably dependent, to a degree, upon the organization's ability to produce a quality product. TRUST IN GOVERNMENT 7& That is, people probably ask themselves some variant of the question: Can this manufacturer get the job done? Similarly, trust in government is probably dependent, to a degree, upon the government's ability to produce things like effective security, infrastructure, and economic growth. Like the auto manufacturer example, people probably ask themselves some variant of the question: Can this government get the job done? Multiple research projects, often from the field of political science, have examined the impact of citizen's perception of government ability on reports of citizen's trust in government. For example, Blind (2006) points out that a government's ability to provide security and services impacts citizens' trust in government. Blind also states that a sense of government professionalism and competence has much the same effect. Hetherington (1998) similarly points out that a number of perspectives on government trust are based on perceptions of government efficiency. As he puts it: Because people are likely to trust things they perceive to be working effectively, the quality of policy outcomes should also help explain trust. Public perceptions