Initial Trust Formation in New Organizational Relationships

Davis, Gerald Smith and Aks Zaheer for their helpful reviews and comments on earlier versions of this paper. Trust is a key enabler of cooperative human actions. Three main deficiencies about our current knowledge of trust are addressed by this paper. First, due to widely divergent conceptual definitions of trust, the literature on trust is in a state of construct confusion. Second, too little is understood about how trust forms and on what trust is based. Third, little has been discussed about the role of emotion in trust formation. To address the first deficiency, this paper develops a typology of trust. The rest of the paper addresses the second and third deficiencies by proposing a model of how trust is initially formed, including the role of emotion. Dispositional, interpersonal, and impersonal (system) trust are integrated in the model. The paper also clarifies the cognitive and emotional bases on which interpersonal trust is formed in early relationships. The implications