What is Trust? A Conceptual Analysis and an Interdisciplinary Model

Trust is a vital relationship concept that needs further conceptual analysis, not just empirical testing. Trust has been defined in so many ways by so many different researchers across disciplines that a typology of the various types of trust is sorely needed. This paper justifies and develops such an interdisciplinary typology and defines the constructs within the typology. These constructs, though defined at the personal level, are scalable to various levels of analysis and may be used in various trust situations, including IS/customer relations. Trust is central to interpersonal (Golembiewski & McConkie, 1975) and commercial (Morgan & Hunt, 1994) relationships. Trust is crucial wherever risk, uncertainty, or interdependence exist (Mayer, Davis & Schoorman, 1995; Mishra, 1996). These conditions flourish in many settings, and certainly exist in the relationship between Information Systems (IS) people and their customers. Trust has been found to be important to IS/customer performance (Nelson & Cooprider, 1996), and is also key in virtual teams (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998) and e-commerce (Ba, Whinston & Zhang, 1999; Hoffman, et al., 1999; Jarvenpaa, Tranctinsky & Vitale, 1998; Noteberg, Christaanse & Wallage, 1999; Stewart, 1999). As conditions become more uncertain because of downsizing, mergers, and more complex business dealings, the need for trust grows (Mishra, 1996). The State of Trust Definitions A good deal of trust research has recently been initiated, with the potential to produce significant understanding of various IS phenomena. However, an understanding of what the term ‘trust’ means is needed in order to interpret and compare trust results. In this paper, we justify and specify a conceptual typology of trust constructs. Then we define the four resulting constructs and ten measurable subconstructs. Distrust constructs are not the same as trust constructs (Lewicki, et al., 1998), and lie outside our present scope. Several researchers have reported that trust definitions are numerous and confusing (e.g., Lewis & Weigert, 1985a; Shapiro, 1987; Taylor, 1989). Some have said that trust is an elusive concept to define (Gambetta, 1988; Yamagishi & Yamagishi, 1994). Others have chosen not to define trust (e.g., Granovetter, 1985; Ouchi, 1981). Why the confusion? One reason is that each discipline views trust from its own unique perspective. Like the story of the six blind men and the elephant, a disciplinary lens causes psychologists to see trust as a personal trait, sociologists to see trust as a social structure, and economists to see trust as an economic choice mechanism (Lewicki & Bunker, 1995). However, the other reason is that trust is itself a vague term. In ordinary English usage, trust has acquired a large number of meanings. That is, depending on the context, we may think of many different things when someone uses the word ‘trust.’ An analysis of the word trust in three unabridged dictionaries (Websters, Random House, and Oxford) showed that trust had far more definitions (9, 24, and 18, respectively) than did the terms cooperation (3, 2, 6), confidence (6, 8, 13), and predictable (1,2, 1). Cooperation, confidence, and predictable are the terms which Mayer, et al. (1995) used to discriminate trust from similar concepts. On average, trust had 17.0 definitions, while the others had an average of 4.7. Hence, trust is naturally hard to narrow down to one specific definition. Few have addressed this issue head-on by trying to reconcile the various types of trust into a sensible set of constructs (exceptions: Barber, 1983; Bromiley & Cummings, 1995; Dobing, 1993; Kee & Knox, 1970; Mayer, et al., 1995; Mishra, 1996). In part, this is because of disciplinary perspective. For example, sociologists Lewis & Weigert (1985b) argued that psychological views of trust are invalid because trust cannot be reduced to a personal characteristic. Thus, social structural definitions (e.g., Shapiro, 1987) are almost impossible to reconcile against personal expectancy definitions (e.g., Rotter, 1971). The other problem has been that empirical research has driven most definitions of trust, and one need only define one type of trust to do empirical research. Therefore, each researcher has developed a narrow conceptualization of trust that fits the type of research they do. They defend their narrow trust conceptualization by referring to the factor analysis. Van de Ven (1989: 487) warned that when theories on a topic widely diverge, the advocates "for each theory engage in activities to make their theory better by increasing