Cross-Cultural Measurement of Supervisor Trustworthiness: An Assessment of Measurement Invariance across Three Cultures

Abstract This paper contributes to the research on supervisor trustworthiness by assessing the measurement equivalence of the trust scales developed by Mayer and Davis [Mayer, R. C., & Davis, J. H. (1999). The effect of the performance appraisal system on trust for management: A field quasi-experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 123–136] across three samples: U.S., Turkey and Singapore. This study found the trust scale to have poor psychometric properties across the board, rendering invariance tests inappropriate. Analysis of the antecedents of trust scales supported the metric equivalence of the integrity measure, but several items of the ability and benevolence scales appeared to be interpreted differently by respondents from collectivist-high power distant versus individualist-low power distant cultures. We advocate the formation of a multinational team of trust and leadership scholars to develop scales in which items reflect not a single culture but are more applicable both in meaning and choice of expression to many cultures.

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