Repairing Individual Trust in Organizational Setting: The Mediating and Moderating Role of Benevolence and Competence Based

Abstract

Introduction: Trust is a social construct that is present in the day-to-day routine of humans negative events such as product failure, revelations of corrupt practices, and unfulfilled promises could distort trusting relationships, develop negative future expectations, and in due course lead to trust violations. To maintain or restore the resultant loss of trust, organizations must examine and understand how trust was violated in the first place since different means of damaged trust are likely to require different reparative responses.

Objectives: This study investigates how individual trust is repaired in an organization using apology and justification as means of repairing competence -based and benevolence-based trust violations.

Study Design: Using a medical practitioner working in a private medical foundation called Save the Child Foundation, this research adopts a quantitative survey methodology using self-administered questionnaires to collect data from 304 patients and workers from a fictitious medical hospital in Cameroon. Hypothesis testing was carried out using structural equation modeling and regression analyses.

Results: Through a scenario questionnaire survey, the study provided support for all of the hypotheses. Hypotheses 1 and 3 focused on the strategies of repairing trust. The result shows that benevolence had a mediating effect on apology, justification and trust repair. With the help of benevolence, medical organizations can easily accept to re-engage with individuals’ doctors (John Benson) after trust violation. This shows that apology and justification are a good combination factor that can be used for repairing individual trust in organizations.

More also, this study shows that the verification of Hypotheses 2 and 4 confirmed that competence-based trust had an important moderating effect on the positive relationship between benevolence-based trust and trust repair. In this case, competence could be regarded as a determining factor of repairing trust that has been violated.

Key words: Trust, Trust Repair, Competence, Benevolence, Justification, Apology

DOI: 10.7176/JMCR/63-05

Publication date: December 31^st 2019