How leaders develop trust in high trust organizations - Many routes to active trusting

Given the prominence of corporate high trust cultures in 21st-century organizations, trust development of managers in their employees becomes an imperative of leadership and part of a manager’s role expectations. Hence, this paper analyzes why managers come to trust their employees and how they combine cues for trusting their employees by responding to and co-creating the specific contexts of their trust. Empirically, this study employs a concurrent nested mixed-methods design with a predominant explorative interview study with 33 medium- and top-level managers and a nested fsQCA analysis of the interview data to study effective configurations of the trust cues identified. As a result, we find four discernible trusting patterns of managers towards their employees; hence four different ways how managers shape the strategic trust imperative into “on the ground” trusting behavior. Our findings not only refine prior prominent, yet too generic models of trust but we also argue in favor of a more configurational, yet idiosyncratic view on managers’ trusting their employees in high trust contexts.