Fostering trust in organizations is challenging and a central concern for modern-day leaders and academics alike. Trust comes on foot and goes away on horseback, as illustrated by many...Show moreFostering trust in organizations is challenging and a central concern for modern-day leaders and academics alike. Trust comes on foot and goes away on horseback, as illustrated by many organizations that struggle to build trust relationships with employees and external stakeholders. A growing body of management research emphasizes the pivotal role of trust in employee retention, productivity, learning, and more. Often, the focus lies with leadership and culture in relation to trust. This article contributes to this debate by investigating the research gap of what organizational structure elements influence employees’ organizational trust in the Dutch context through a survey conducted among 110 Dutch employees of public and private organizations. The findings revealed that structural design significantly impacts trust dynamics. Specialization and span of control emerged as positive predictors of trust, while centralization and hierarchy negatively influenced trust. Notably, formalization and standardization showed no significant effects, as did the hypothesized sectoral differences, indicating that structural predictors of trust have similar effects across the public and private sectors in the Dutch context. By demonstrating the significance of structural design, this study also emphasizes the need for further investigation on why and how organizational structure elements influence employees’ organizational trust in a general context, in supplement to leadership and culture. In addition, the findings offer several actionable insights for organizational leaders.Show less
This research addresses the willingness to join a nonprofit organization as a volunteer of people who perceive that their social identity is different from the social identity of the current...Show moreThis research addresses the willingness to join a nonprofit organization as a volunteer of people who perceive that their social identity is different from the social identity of the current volunteers of the organization. Specifically, a social identity approach was applied, and it was predicted that for non-volunteers who have atypical social identities the organizational warmth, organizational morality, and organizational communications about the value of social identity, would influence the motivation to join the non-profit organization through psychological safety and organizational trust as mediators. The online research, for which non-volunteers who have atypical social identities were recruited as research participants via the Academic Prolific Online Platform (n = 184), had a 4-cell between subjects’ experimental design (organizational warmth, organizational morality, communications of social identity value versus ‘Wikipedia information’ control condition). The participants were presented the US Fire Brigade as type of non-profit organization, were thereafter randomly allocated across the experimental conditions, and subsequently completed a questionnaire that recorded the variables of the research. The data was analyzed using one-way ANOVAs and multiple mediating regressions analyses. ANOVAs showed that the manipulations of organizational warmth and the organizational communications about the value of social identity were successful, but also that the manipulation of organizational morality was not successful. Subsequently, a one-way ANOVA showed that organizational warmth and the organizational communications about the value of social identity instilled trust in the organization and sense of psychological safety in the participants. Thereafter, mediation regression analyses showed that organizational warmth and organizational communications about social identity value related significantly and indirectly related to the motivation to join the non-profit organization as a volunteer through organizational trust and sense of psychological safety. The implications, limitations, and suggestions for further research, of the study are discussed.Show less
