Understanding what really drives trust in the workplace and the importance of trustor characteristics as predictors of co-worker trust

Most interpersonal trust models attribute outcomes primarily to effects of trustee characteristics (e.g., ability, benevolence and integrity), yet Jones & Shah's 2016 variance partitioning study remarkably observed that variance in between-trustors influences affected trustworthiness outcomes more than between-trustees influences. Effects of trustor characteristics are rarely explored by trust psychology scholars (even though most readily acknowledge that trust outcomes are rooted in trustors' information availability), so little is known about how trustor characteristics explain trust. A core issue has been the absence of a continuous measure of trustor information availability, which has limited the scope of research inquiry and left extant trust models unable to generalize across many common situations. Moreover, extant trust psychology models treat trustee characteristics as exogenous (independent) trust predictors, even though they are measured by trustor observations and thus are necessarily endogenous to some degree of between-trustor variability. This study bridges these gaps in trust literature by employing a continuous variable representing trustors' contextual information (CI) availability (Funder, 1995; Hawthorne, 2022, 2024), as a trust predictor, and by including relationships between trustor and trustee characteristics (mediation effects) as indirect trust predictors. The examination process comprised an exploratory study (N = 334) that developed and analyzed four explanatory models, which in turn were cross-verified and validated by an independent study (N = 815). When both direct and indirect effects were taken into account, total unique between-trustors effects on trust outcomes were observed to be much greater than total unique between-trustees effects, which, contrary to the tenets of extant trust psychology literature, suggests that trust outcomes are not explained primarily by the perceived trustworthiness of potential trustees.