Repairing Trust in Organizations and Institutions: Toward a Conceptual Framework

Main author: Bachmann, Reinhard
Other authors: Gillespie, Nicole
Priem, Richard
Format: Journal Article           
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id eprints-20219
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
description 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.
format Journal Article
author Bachmann, Reinhard
author_facet Bachmann, Reinhard
Gillespie, Nicole
Priem, Richard
authorStr Bachmann, Reinhard
author_letter Bachmann, Reinhard
author2 Gillespie, Nicole
Priem, Richard
author2Str Gillespie, Nicole
Priem, Richard
title Repairing Trust in Organizations and Institutions: Toward a Conceptual Framework
publisher Sage
publishDate 2015
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/20219/