Social sexual behaviour and co-worker trust in start-up enterprises

Workplace behaviours and norms are gaining increased prominence in the literature on start-up enterprises. Research attention has focused on the critical role that these behaviours and norms play in influencing start-up effectiveness but our understanding of their role in influencing trust in a start-up environment is underdeveloped. The present article investigates the role that workplace social sexual behaviours play in shaping co-worker trust within start-ups. Using data from the GUESSS (2018) international study of entrepreneurial attitudes and experiences, we find that certain social sexual behaviours undermine trust, and related outcomes such as the willingness to delegate and the sense that co-workers are honest. In particular, experiencing inappropriate looks, flirtation, or sexual gossip predict lower levels of co-worker trust. Our findings also indicate that characteristics of the source of the behaviour are important in terms of gender and hierarchical relationship. In our discussion section, we consider the mechanisms underlying these relationships and in particular how social sexual behaviour may influence trustworthiness. Taken together, our results point to a significant efficiency cost to new enterprises that take a permissive view of social sexual behaviour in the workplace

Influencing a nation: how a leader’s interpersonal emotion regulation influences citizen compliance via trust and emotions during a global pandemic

During crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, it was necessary for political leaders to influence citizens to comply with public health measures and restrictions. These health measures (e.g., physical distancing, staying at home) had substantial negative effects on individuals’ lives and thus were sometimes met with defensive, noncooperative responses. To influence citizens’ compliance with public health guidance and nationally imposed restrictions, political leaders needed to effectively motivate them through their public communications. We argue that while negative emotions may have discouraged citizens from deviating from public health restrictions, other factors such as citizens’ trust in political leaders played a role as well. We investigated whether the perception of the interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies used by government leaders in ministerial briefings impacted citizens’ compliance intentions via either negative affect or perceived trustworthiness. Across three studies based in Western Europe (Studies 1 and 2 survey, Study 3 experimental), we consistently found that a leader’s affect-improving IER strategies increased compliance intentions via perceived trustworthiness but not via negative affect. Affect-worsening IER strategies demonstrated either no effect or an indirect worsening effect on the compliance intentions of citizens. Our findings highlight the importance of IER strategies in ministerial briefings and perceived trustworthiness of political leaders in motivating citizens to comply with public health restrictions during a pandemic.</p

The neuroscience of trust violation: Differential activation of the default mode network in ability, benevolence and integrity breaches

Trust is widely regarded as being foundational in workplace relationships. The violation of interpersonal trust results in a range of negative affective, cognitive and behavioural consequences for the injured party. However, research has yet to isolate the specific neural areas and processes activated when different types of interpersonal trust are breached. Using electroencephalogram with 68 participants, we identified the effects of three distinct types of trust violations—ability violation, integrity violation and benevolence violations—on electrical brain activity. Our findings indicate that trust violations are processed in social cognitive-related brain areas. Specifically, our results identify the significance of the default mode network (DMN), relevant to the processing of social information, in trust violation and further isolated distinct activity for ability, integrity and benevolence trust violation, with integrity violations demonstrating the greatest reaction in the DMN. Benevolence violations generated the next greatest reaction but were not significantly different from the ability violations. This potential distinction may be worth further investigation in future research. Our findings highlight the potential importance of the DMN in processing cues regarding the trustworthiness of others and the distinctiveness of the processing of violation cues of the three facets of trustworthiness. </p