The Routledge Companion to Trust

26Leadership and Trust

Deanne N. Den Hartog

Introduction

Trust forms a psychological state that involves confident positive expectations about another’s motives with respect to oneself in situations entailing risk (cf. Boon & Holmes, 1991). Trust is essential to cooperation between different parties and forms an important feature in dyadic interpersonal relationships as well as in larger collectivities such as organizations. In other words, cooperation ‘requires trust in the sense that the dependent parties need some degree of assurance that the other, non-dependent parties will not defect’ (Williams, 1988, p. 8). In line with this, Cook and Wall (1980) view trust between individuals and groups within the organization as crucial to its long-term ...