Table Of ContentSpringer Series in Emerging Cultural Perspectives in Work,
Organizational, and Personnel Studies
Catherine T. Kwantes
Ben C. H. Kuo Editors
Trust and
Trustworthiness
across Cultures
Implications for Societies and
Workplaces
Springer Series in Emerging Cultural
Perspectives in Work, Organizational,
and Personnel Studies
Series Editors
Sharon Glazer, Division of Applied Behavioral Sciences, University of Baltimore,
Baltimore, MD, USA
Catherine T. Kwantes, Department of Psychology, University of Windsor,
Windsor, ON, Canada
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16418
Catherine T. Kwantes • Ben C. H. Kuo
Editors
Trust and Trustworthiness
across Cultures
Implications for Societies and Workplaces
Editors
Catherine T. Kwantes Ben C. H. Kuo
Department of Psychology Department of Psychology
University of Windsor University of Windsor
Windsor, ON, Canada Windsor, ON, Canada
ISSN 2662-4672 ISSN 2662-4680 (electronic)
Springer Series in Emerging Cultural Perspectives in Work, Organizational, and Personnel
Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-56717-0 ISBN 978-3-030-56718-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56718-7
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
This edited volume came about as the result of a large international project on trust
and trustworthiness conducted between 2011 and 2018 – the International
Trustworthiness Study (ITS; see Appendix for more information). For this multina-
tional study, both quantitative and qualitative data regarding descriptions of trust-
worthiness in various social and organizational roles as well as individual
endorsement of cultural values and beliefs were gathered from 12 countries. The
ITS was developed as an initial empirical attempt to learn more about the cross-
cultural, or etic, understanding of what determines trustworthiness across cultural
contexts and social roles. As the project progressed, it became apparent that a more
in-depth exploration of each of the cultural contexts, or emic understanding, was
important – how trust and trustworthiness are conceptualized within each culture
and what aspects of the cultural contexts may contribute to the understanding of
how and why these descriptions emerged. Thus this book has a focus on cultural
contexts that trust and trustworthiness take place in – with emphases on societal and
organizational contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume was authored by an ITS
collaborator to provide a deeper understanding of the context within which trust and
trustworthiness conceptions are constructed within that particular culture.
As such, this volume represents the first work of this kind in surveying trustwor-
thiness from a cross-cultural and international perspective. This edited book fea-
tures a total of eight chapters from contributors around the world. Distinctively, we
asked our international contributors to review the construct of trustworthiness from
both etic and emic perspectives from their specific national/regional/societal con-
text. The book begins with a chapter by Kwantes and McMurphy reviewing etic
approaches to understanding what constitutes trustworthiness within the contexts of
societal culture and organizational culture.
In Chap. 2, Porto and Pilati describe trust in Brazil by situating it within the
country’s colonial history, as well as in its relationship to the indigenous (emic)
concept of jeitinho in Brazil – a creative problem-solving strategy involving decep-
tion or trickery. In Chap. 3, Idemudia and Olawa link South African construction of
trust and trustworthiness to Africa’s past history of colonialism and slavery and to
the African notion of “Ubuntu” (“I am because we are”) – an emic, interdependent
v
vi Preface
definition of selfhood in Africa. In Chap. 4, Kartolo and Kuo survey the deep-seated
cultural influences of Confucianism on trust and trustworthiness in contemporary
Taiwan. The authors unpack trustworthiness from the Confucian principles of Xin
and Guanxi. In Chap. 5, Talaei and Hashemi describe and assess national trust in
Iran by reviewing the country’s cultural dimensions and its social and geopolitical
histories, including wars, conflicts, and governance. In Chap. 6, Leupold assesses
trust in contemporary USA from its cultural dimensions and surveys trust as a pro-
cess. The chapter further highlights a general trend of decreasing trust being
observed in the USA over the recent decades toward political system, government,
and media. In Chap. 7, Burr and Samardzic illustrate the association between
Canada’s multiculturalism and perspective of trust and trustworthiness. In particu-
lar, the chapter describes the impacts of Canada’s cultural dimensions and its diverse
demographics (Anglo, Franco, Indigenous, and immigrant populations) have on the
shaping of trust. Finally, in Chap. 8, Kanazawa and Watanabe address trust in Japan
and how the theory of “rice culture” collectivism impacts how trust and trustworthi-
ness are determined. They illuminate their analyses with findings from trust game
research published in Japanese, drawing inferences related to trust and trustworthi-
ness in the Japanese workplace.
We believe in this edited volume the unique insights and syntheses being offered
by these chapters and their corresponding authors provide valuable lessons for all
who are interested in the research and the practice related to trust and trustworthi-
ness across roles, contexts, and cultures. It is our hope that this book will serve as a
basis for further research and innovation about trust and trustworthiness, as well as
spark further conversations and inquiries about the topics internationally.
Windsor, ON, Canada Catherine T. Kwantes
Ben C. H. Kuo
Contents
1 Contextual Influences on Trust and Trustworthiness:
An Etic Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Catherine T. Kwantes and Suzanne McMurphy
2 Trust in Brazil: The Interplay of Jeitinho and Trust Conception . . . 17
Juliana B. Porto and Ronaldo Pilati
3 Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Trust and Trustworthiness
from an African Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Erhabor S. Idemudia and Babatola D. Olawa
4 Trust in the Taiwanese Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Arief Kartolo and Ben C. H. Kuo
5 Trust in Iran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Amirreza Talaei and Esmaeil Hashemi
6 Examining and Understanding the Current State of Trust
in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Christopher R. Leupold
7 Canadian Culture and Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Catherine Burr and Tanja Samardzic
8 Trust Building in the Globalizing Workplace of Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Shinichiro Watanabe and Yuichiro Kanazawa
Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
vii
Chapter 1
Contextual Influences on Trust
and Trustworthiness: An Etic Perspective
Catherine T. Kwantes and Suzanne McMurphy
Abstract In this chapter, we focus on trustworthiness as determined on the basis of
role relationships – how these roles, nested in both societal and organizational cul-
tures, help to operationalize trustworthiness. Although societal and organizational
cultures both prescribe what is expected of an individual in a given social role, the
two contexts are related, as organizational cultures are nested within societal cul-
tures and are therefore constrained by societal culture. For example, power distance,
a societal cultural variable that reflects the extent to which a society teaches its
members that hierarchy is natural and expected, impacts how those at different lev-
els of social hierarchy are expected to behave. In cultures where there is stronger
hierarchy, those in lower power positions tend to disagree less with those in higher
power positions, and a situation of dependency is more strongly fostered in high-
power-distance cultures – both in society at large and in organizations.
Keywords Trust · Trustworthiness · Etic · Societal culture · Organizational culture
Trust is fundamental to all human interaction. Some theorists have even asserted
that “the entire fabric of our day-to-day living, of our social order, rests on trust”
(Rotter, 1971, p. 443). Others have described trust as “the single most important
ingredient for the development and maintenance of happy, well-functioning rela-
tionships” (Simpson, 2007, p. 264). Numerous and varied benefits of trusting rela-
tionships include increased social capital (Kramer, 1999), decreased conflict
(Zaheer, McEvily, & Perrone, 1998), and increased prosocial behaviors (Yakovleva,
Reilly, & Werko, 2010). Humans have an inborn desire to trust and to have those
whom one interacts with to be trustworthy. When trust is misplaced or abused, there
can be high costs to the trustor; therefore, trusting means taking a risk and a
C. T. Kwantes · S. McMurphy ()
University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1
C. T. Kwantes, B. C. H. Kuo (eds.), Trust and Trustworthiness across Cultures,
Springer Series in Emerging Cultural Perspectives in Work, Organizational,
and Personnel Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56718-7_1
2 C. T. Kwantes and S. McMurphy
willingness to be vulnerable (Kramer, 1999; Misztal, 2013). When trust is mis-
placed or abused, negative consequences can come to pass for that individual who
was willing to take a risk, such as when one trusts another with private information.
If that trust is misplaced or abused, the private information does not stay private.
The determination of whom to trust, and for what, therefore plays an important role
in decisions to trust.
Determining the trustworthiness of another takes place in a social context, and
this context matters as Bhattacharya, Devinney, and Pillutla (1998) state “it is
impossible to think about individuals or organizations having innate levels of trust
and trustworthiness independent of the environment” (p. 468). While there are mul-
tiple potential factors that can be drawn upon in making such a decision, all of these
are contained within a context (Singh, 2012), and that context itself impacts how
these decisions are made. Any discussion of a phenomenon within context requires
an acknowledgment that there are both emic and etic aspects. Context provides the
means to making sense of a situation and provides both surface- and deep-level
information about the phenomenon, its likely origin, and the expected outcomes of
the situation. Humans learn both explicitly and implicitly, through vicarious experi-
ences of others in the same context, the meaning expressed in that context, and how
various behaviors and circumstances are best explained. However, the fact that con-
text matters also presupposes the idea that there are boundaries to that context. To
the extent that a given phenomenon is part of the human condition, it implies that
there are other contexts within which the same phenomenon may manifest itself.
Examining a phenomenon across contexts, comparing and contrasting when the
phenomenon occurs, the circumstance under which it occurs, and the meaning-mak-
ing in multiple contexts constitute the emic aspect of the phenomenon.
This chapter takes a closer look at the etic aspects of how trustworthiness is
determined with a focus on societal culture and organizational culture contexts,
acknowledging that one is nested in the other. Specifically, in this chapter, we intend
to review and demonstrate that trust and trustworthiness are products of context.
Context at several levels of analysis is important to trust and trustworthiness – cul-
tures at both the societal level and the organizational level are contextual factors that
impact how trust is developed and how trustworthiness is assessed (Kwantes,
McMurphy, Kanazawa, & Kuo, 2019). Whitener, Maznevski, Hua, Saebo, and
Ekelund (2000) note that societal culture is important in determining the expecta-
tions of trustworthiness as “simply put, culture is a shared agreement (usually
implicit) about how to approach the world and each other” (p. 4). Expanding on this
idea, Matsumoto (2007) states that “social roles are comprised of expectations and
normative behaviors that emerge from the psychological meanings attributed to
situational contexts; these meanings are cultural” (p. 1285), thus indicating that
societal culture, social roles, and expected behaviors in those roles are inseparably
connected.
Thus, this chapter also focusses on trustworthiness as determined on the basis of
role relationships – how these roles, nested in both societal and organizational cul-
tures, help to define what trustworthiness is. While societal and organizational
cultures prescribe what is expected of an individual in a given social role, the two
