Trust Differences Across National-Societal Cultures: Much to Do, or Much Ado about Nothing?

Does trust and its development, functions and meaning, differ between people from different national–societal cultures? There is considerable anecdotal evidence and some theoretical argumentation to suggest it does, but are these supported by empirical research? This chapter reviews the available empirical evidence on the effects of national–societal culture on interpersonal trust. It focuses largely on quantitative empirical evidence to consider the extent to which, and the ways in which, interpersonal trust differs across national–societal cultures. In every category of our review we found evidence of cross-cultural differences, particularly on generalized trust, and also evidence of trust universals across cultures. In evaluating these findings, we conclude that trust may operate as a variform universal and variform functional universal. We conclude with two proposed routes for future research, and implications for practice. Introduction To an ever-increasing extent, ‘work’ involves close interaction and cooperation with people who come from a national–societal cultural background different from one's own. This emerging reality of work can be attributed to a number of factors. First, with the unrelenting advance of globalization, more and more organizations are taking a global approach to operations, including the operation of overseas international joint ventures and alliances, working with offshore suppliers and customers, and conducting global searches for talent. Second, the advance of communication technologies such as e-mail and videoconferencing has fostered a movement toward global virtual teams involving individuals from a variety of different cultural backgrounds

The Actor-Partner Interdependence Model: A Method for Studying Trust in Dyadic Relationships

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How do leaders repair trust? An examination of trust repair during the UK expenses scandal

For decades the importance of trust in leadership has been emphasised (Bowler & Karp, 2004; Burke, Sims, Lazzara, & Salas, 2007; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Liu, Siu, & Shi, 2010). Trust is central to effective leadership and understanding how to build and repair trust is considered a “critical management competency” (Lewicki & Bunker, 1996). Yet little empirical research has examined how leaders repair trust once it is broken (Dirks, Lewicki & Zaheer, 2009). The few trust repair studies conducted to date have been experimental in nature using undergraduate students and have decontextualised the trust breach and repair process (Gillespie & Dietz, 2009)

Understanding the Effects of Substantive Responses on Trust Following a Transgression

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the implications of ‘substantive’ responses for the repair of trust following a violation and the cognitive processes that govern how and when they are effective. These studies examined two forms of substantive responses, penance and regulation, that represent different categories of trust repair attempts. The findings from Studies 1–3 suggest that both can be effective to the extent that they elicit the crucial mediating cognition of perceived repentance. Data from Study 2 revealed that trustors saw signals of repentance as more informative when the transgression was due to a lapse of competence than due to a lapse of integrity. Study 4 compared these substantive responses to apologies (a non-substantive response) and revealed that, despite their surface-level differences, they each repaired trust through ‘perceived repentance.’ The paper offers an integrative framework for understanding the relationships among a range of trustor responses

An approach to functionally relevant clustering of the protein universe: Active site profile-based clustering of protein structures and sequences.

Protein function identification remains a significant problem. Solving this problem at the molecular functional level would allow mechanistic determinant identification-amino acids that distinguish details between functional families within a superfamily. Active site profiling was developed to identify mechanistic determinants. DASP and DASP2 were developed as tools to search sequence databases using active site profiling. Here, TuLIP (Two-Level Iterative clustering Process) is introduced as an iterative, divisive clustering process that utilizes active site profiling to separate structurally characterized superfamily members into functionally relevant clusters. Underlying TuLIP is the observation that functionally relevant families (curated by Structure-Function Linkage Database, SFLD) self-identify in DASP2 searches; clusters containing multiple functional families do not. Each TuLIP iteration produces candidate clusters, each evaluated to determine if it self-identifies using DASP2. If so, it is deemed a functionally relevant group. Divisive clustering continues until each structure is either a functionally relevant group member or a singlet. TuLIP is validated on enolase and glutathione transferase structures, superfamilies well-curated by SFLD. Correlation is strong; small numbers of structures prevent statistically significant analysis. TuLIP-identified enolase clusters are used in DASP2 GenBank searches to identify sequences sharing functional site features. Analysis shows a true positive rate of 96%, false negative rate of 4%, and maximum false positive rate of 4%. F-measure and performance analysis on the enolase search results and comparison to GEMMA and SCI-PHY demonstrate that TuLIP avoids the over-division problem of these methods. Mechanistic determinants for enolase families are evaluated and shown to correlate well with literature results