Repairing Trust in Organizations and Institutions: Toward a Conceptual Framework

Bachmann, Reinhard; Gillespie, Nicole; Priem, Richard

Abstract

Trust plays a fundamental role in facilitating social exchange, yet recent global events have undermined trust in many of society’s institutions and organizations. This raises the pertinent question of how trust in organizations and institutions can be restored once it has been lost. The emerging literature on trust repair is largely focused at the micro level, with limited examination of how these processes operate at the macro level and across levels. In this introductory essay, we show how the papers in this special issue each advance our understanding of macro-level trust repair. We draw on these papers, as well as the extant interdisciplinary literature, to propose an integrated conceptual model of six key mechanisms for restoring trust in organizations and institutions, highlighting the merits, limits and paradoxes of each. We conclude that no single mechanism can be relied on to rebuild organizational trust and identify a future research agenda for advancing scholarly understanding of organizational and institutional trust repair.

Citation

Bachmann, R., Gillespie, N., & Priem, R. (2015). Repairing Trust in Organizations and Institutions: Toward a Conceptual Framework. Organization Studies, 36(9), 1123-1142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840615599334

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 21, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Aug 21, 2015
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jul 25, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 6, 2019
• Journal: Organization Studies
• Print ISSN: 0170-8406
• Electronic ISSN: 1741-3044
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 36
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 1123-1142
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840615599334
• Keywords: Conceptual framework, trust crises, trust in institutions, trust in organizations, trust repair