Organisational trust and performance in different contexts

Abstract

The aim of this study is to shed lights on the impacts of various dimensions of organisational trust on organisational performance in a specific context, comparing the information and communication technologies (ICT) and forest industries with different kinds of employees (i.e., white-collar vs. blue-collar employees). Specifically, we move beyond most prior studies on organisational trust and simultaneously study trust equilibrium pattern of the relationship between interpersonal and impersonal with organisational performance. Our quantitative empirical analysis is based on a two-survey data including respondents within large corporations in ICT (304 respondents) and forest industries (411) in Finland. For the analyses we utilise PLS for structural equation modelling (SEM). The results show the connection of interpersonal trust and impersonal trust to the performance. The results emphasised the role of competence-related dimensions in performance. In addition, we observed some industry-specific peculiarities regarding the effect of both interpersonal and impersonal trust.