Organizational Trustworthiness: Findings from the Population of Organizational Ethnographies

Contemporary workplaces solicit heightened effort and initiative from employees through teams and related forms of participation. Trustworthy behavior on the part of organizations is an important precondition for heightened employee effort and initiative. The current article develops a model of organizational trustworthiness based on: (1) employment practices and (2) managerial competence. Testing such models has been difficult in the past because of the difficulty of gathering data on relevant management and employee behaviors across a broad population of organizations. The current article uses data derived from a content analysis of the population of organizational ethnographies (N=204) to address this problem. The analysis verifies the existence of employment practices and management competence as separate factors. The effects of these factors on worker citizenship, employee-management conflict, and coworker relations are also evaluated. Supportive employment practices are an important precondition for worker citizenship. Management competence, however, is even more consequential for worker citizenship and for other workplace relations as well. The findings highlight the importance of cross-methods comparisons for advancing organizational theory.