Strategies of trust restoration necessarily differ with the kind of relationship the parties have. For example, research has demonstrated that people who perceive few alternatives to their existing relationship or experience a high degree of interdependence may continue the relationship with the partner despite repeated or even violent trust violations (Rusbult and Martz, 1995; Tomlinson, 2011). It may also be that those who are heavily invested in high-IBT relationships are actually less sensitive to trust violations (Robinson, 1996).
Despite the generally negative affect associated with distrust, we should note that trust restoration is not always a desirable alternative. Distrust is necessary when people perceive a need to protect themselves or others from possible harm or when other parties in the relationship are not well known (Lewicki et al., 1998). Some work teams also perform better in CBD situations, perhaps because each member takes more care to ensure that the partners perform as expected. This self-policing contributes to higher product quality.
Implications for Managing Conflict More Effectively
Some of what we have said about trust we have known for a long time, but other parts are quite new and somewhat speculative. They remain to be validated through further research on how people develop and repair trust in their relationships. By way of summarizing this chapter, we make some statements about trust and its implications for managing conflict:
The existence of trust between individuals makes conflict resolution easier and more effective. This point is obvious to anyone who has been in a conflict. A party who trusts another is likely to believe the other’s words and assume that the other will act out of good intentions, and probably look for productive ways to resolve a conflict should one occur. Conversely, if one distrusts another, one might disbelieve the other’s words, assume that the other is acting out of dark intentions, and defend oneself against the other or attempt to beat and conquer the other. As we have tried to indicate several times in this chapter, the level of trust or distrust in a relationship therefore definitively shapes emergent conflict dynamics.
Trust is often the first casualty in conflict. If trust makes conflict resolution easier and more effective, eruption of conflict usually injures trust and builds distrust. It does so because it violates the trust expectations, creates the perception of unreliability in the other party, and breaks promises. Moreover, the conflict may serve to undermine the foundations of identification-based trust that may exist between the parties. Thus, as conflict escalates, for whatever reason or cause, it serves to decrease trust and increase distrust. The deeper the distrust that is developed, the more the parties focus on defending themselves against the other or attempting to win the conflict, which further serves to increase the focus on distrust and decrease actions that might rebuild trust.
Creating trust in a relationship is initially a matter of building calculus-based trust. Many of those writing on trust have suggested that one of the objectives in resolving a conflict is to “build trust.” Yet in spite of these glib recommendations, few authors are sufficiently detailed and descriptive of those actions required to actually do so. From our review of the literature and the research we have reported in this chapter, it is clear to us that to build trust, a party must begin with the actions we outline in this chapter: act consistently and reliably, meet deadlines and commitments, and repeatedly do so over time or over several bands of activity in the relationship.
Relationships can be strengthened if the parties are able to build identification-based trust. Strong calculus-based trust is critical to any stable relationship, but IBT (based on perceived common goals and purposes, common values, and common identity) is likely to strengthen the overall trust between the parties and the ability of the relationship to withstand conflict that may otherwise be relationship fracturing. If the parties perceive themselves as having strong common goals, values, and identities, they are motivated to sustain the relationship and find productive ways to resolve the conflict so that it does not damage the relationship.
Relationships characterized by calculus-based or identification-based distrust are likely to be conflict laden, and eruption of conflict within that relationship is likely to feed and encourage further distrust. At the calculus-based level, the actor finds the other’s behavior (at least) unreliable and unpredictable, and the other’s intentions and motivations might be seen as intentionally malevolent in nature. At the identification-based level, the actor believes that he and the other are committed to dissimilar goals, values, and purposes and might thus attribute hostile motives and intentions to the other. Once such negative expectations are created, actions by the other become negative self-fulfilling prophecies (“I expect the worst of the other, and his behavior confirms my worst fears”), which often lead the conflict into greater scope, intensity, and even intractability.
Most relationships are not purely trust and distrust but contain elements of both. As a result, we have positive and negative feelings about the other, which produces another level of conflict, an intrapsychic conflict often called “ambivalence.” States of ambivalence are characterized by elements of both trust and distrust for another; the internal conflict created by that ambivalence serves to undermine clear expectations of the other’s behavior and force the actor to scrutinize every action by the other to determine whether it should be counted in the trust or the distrust column. Ambivalent relationships are often finely grained and finely differentiated (Gabarro, 1978) because the actor is forced to determine the contexts in which the other can be trusted and those in which the other should be distrusted. As noted elsewhere (Thompson, Zanna, and Griffin, 1995; Lewicki and McAllister, 1998), ambivalence can lead actors to become incapacitated in further action or modify strategies of influence with the other party. Thus, an actor’s internal conflict between trust and distrust probably also affects how he handles the interpersonal conflict between himself and the other party. Because of the number of bands in the bandwidth of a relationship and the ways in which trust and distrust can mix in any given relationship, we also argue that relationships holding varied degrees of ambivalence are far more common than relationships characterized by “pure” high trust or high distrust.
It is possible to repair trust—although it is easier to write about the steps of such repair than to actually perform it. Effective trust repair is often a key part of effective conflict resolution. In the preceding section of this chapter, we discussed some of the steps necessary to repair trust. Three major strategies were identified: providing a social account (e.g., apology) that explains the violation and verbally attempts to minimize the trust damage created by the violation; providing penance to economically compensate the victim for the tangible costs of the trust violation; and introducing structural changes or rules and regulations that attempt to minimize the likelihood of trust violations in the future. Research into the effectiveness of these strategies is growing, and more work is necessary to identify which strategies are likely to be more effective given different types of violations.
Repairing trust may take a long time because the parties have to reestablish reliability and dependability that can occur only over time. Therefore, although rebuilding trust may be necessary for effective conflict resolution in the relationship over the long run, addressing and managing the distrust may be the most effective strategy for short-term containment of conflict. By managing distrust, we engage in certain activities:
We explicitly address the behaviors that created the distrust. These may be actions of unreliability and undependability, harsh comments and criticism, betrayal of previous agreements, or aggressive and antagonistic activities occurring as the conflict escalated.
If possible, each person responsible for a trust violation or act of distrust should apologize and give a full account of the reasons for the trust violation. Acknowledging responsibility for actions that created the trust violation, and expressing regret for harm or damage caused by the violation, is often a necessary step in reducing dis
trust. Alternative actions, such as penance and structural approaches to minimizing trust violations, may also be necessary.
We restate and renegotiate the expectations for the other’s conduct in the future. The parties have to articulate expectations about the behavior that needs to occur and commit to those behaviors in future interactions.
We agree on procedures for monitoring and verifying the designated actions to ensure that commitments are being met.
We simultaneously create ways to minimize our vulnerability or dependence on the other party in areas where distrust has developed. This often occurs as the vulnerable parties find ways to ensure that they are no longer vulnerable to the other’s exploitation or identify alternative ways to have their needs met. If one person depends on another for a ride to work and the driver is consistently late or occasionally forgets, then even if the actor accepts the other’s apology and commitment to be more reliable, the actor may also explore alternative ways to get to work.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, we have described the critical role that trust and distrust play in relationships. We have reviewed some of the basic research on trust and elaborated on the types of trust that exist in most interpersonal relationships. We have suggested that trust and distrust coexist in most relationships, that trust and distrust can be calculus based or identification based, and that relationships differ in form and character as a function of the relative weight of the two types of trust in the relationship. Finally, we have suggested that managing any relationship requires us to both create trust and manage distrust effectively. These processes are most critical when trust is broken and needs to be repaired. A great deal of research remains to be done on these propositions, but we hope that the ideas proposed in this chapter serve to move this work forward.
Notes
1. The term trustor has typically been reserved for the “donor, settlor, grantor or other person creating a trust” in a legal or fiduciary capacity (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). In the broader context of interpersonal trust relationships discussed in this chapter, we refer to the trustor as the person initiating and expressing the trust gesture and the trustee as the person receiving that trust.
2. In earlier work, Lewicki and Bunker (1995, 1996) identified knowledge-based trust as a separate trust. We now believe that knowledge is a dimension of relationships, along which people move from uncertainty to confidence about the other’s intentions, motivations, and behaviors.
3. This is an important point. If CBD is high, we believe that parties are likely to leave the relationship—assuming the interdependence between them and others is not required and that they have viable alternative ways of getting their needs met (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959; Fisher, Ury, and Patton, 1981; and Lewicki, Barry, and Saunders, 2010).
4. Although we do not have empirical evidence to support it at this writing, our belief is that expectation violations function much like the chutes-and-ladders process we described in discussing calculus-based trust. Thus, the impact of expecting trust and experiencing distrust is more disconfirming and distressing than expecting distrust and encountering trust. Expecting trust and having it violated in a high-trust environment is more disruptive than encountering trust in a high-distrust environment (Lewicki and Bunker, 1996). To our knowledge, no research has been done on reactions to expecting distrust and experiencing trust.
5. Although we indicated that trust violations can occur in both directions, we discuss only violations of trusting expectations, not violations of distrusting expectations.
6. Both theory and research on this subject are currently unclear about whether trust is actually repaired or restored. Most research simply looks at changes in trust following efforts to repair a trust violation. It is still unclear whether rebuilt or restored trust is significantly different in structure and character from trust that has never been violated (see Dirks et al., 2009 for a fuller exploration of this idea).
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