2023 COMMENTS, CONTRIBUTIONS & CONCLUSIONS | The Fourth Wave

In their 2022 paper, Trust Within the Workplace, authors Kurt Dirks of Olin Business School and Bart de Jong of Durham University Business School trace the evolution of trust as a core concept in organizational psychology and organizational behavior as fields of study.1 They discern two “waves” of research. The first wave, which took shape in earnest in the mid-90s, established the basic building blocks of trust as a field of inquiry, with emphasis on definitions, conceptual clarity, and the causes and consequences of trust as a social phenomenon. The second wave of research questioned the assumptions made in the first wave and raised questions that had not yet been adequately considered. This included inquiry into the relationship between trust and social networks, and how ideas from behavioral economics might apply. In the wake of recent organizational developments and societal disruptions, Dirks and De Jong now see the emergence of a third wave of trust research. This is aimed specifically at examining the implications that past research holds for trust as a critical workplace concern, especially as new technologies transform how work is organized and conducted. 

Trust and technology will shape the future of work, the researchers argue. “New organizational forms will have important implications in terms of shifts in referents of trust and the key factors driving trust,” they argue. This evolution of workplace realities is all the more important given that “trust in institutions and leaders has been in crisis across the globe.” Taken together, these developments suggest the need for research aimed at understanding these changes in the workplace and devising adequate means of addressing them appropriately.“Our final point involves the ultimate purpose of trust research—to make organizations and teams function more smoothly, to make workplaces more humane, and to promote collaborative work to address important organizational challenges,” Dirks and De Jong conclude. “Measuring trust in new ways (e.g., big data applications), and analyzing these data with new methodologies, may allow new questions that yield new insights or overturn existing ones,” they suggest. “Our call to action is for trust scholars to consider how we can ensure that our work has an impact on organizations and society.”