Trust and the design of work: Complementary constructs in satisfaction and performance

The article presents results that indicate that trust and job design are complementary concepts in understanding outcomes like intention to quit and satisfaction. We conceptualized a worker's beliefs that a supervisor can be trusted as being composed of three main elements beliefs in the supervisor's predictability, benevolence and fairness. This was motivated in part by a desire to conceptualize trust in a way that distinguished it from leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. The capacity of this measure of trust to predict self-reported outcomes was then compared with a job's motivational potential score, as a way of testing the trust measure's criterion validity. To do so, the results from two separate surveys were analysed. The first was based on the questionnaire responses of 535 employees in the telephone industry in the province of British Columbia; the second, of 230 service station employees from across Canada. In the studies reported here, supervisor relationships accounted for a significant amount of the variance on a variety of criterion measures. The results also suggested that perceptions of trust act independently of job design factors in affecting the outcome variables of absence, intention to quit, satisfaction and performance. In addition, the results indicated trust to be as important as job design factors in predicting outcomes.