Take My Word for It: How Organizational Vocabularies Foster Trust Across Boundaries

We examine how the presence of interpersonal trust relations within organizations are associated with the tendency of participants to share organizational vocabularies – sets of words that participants adopt to make sense of their organizational environment and negotiate its intersubjective meaning. In uncertain organizational settings, shared vocabularies offer a linguistic foundation for managing ambiguity, enabling trust to form in the absence of complete information. We specify and estimate statistical models that capture the effect of shared organizational vocabularies on the likelihood of observing interpersonal trust relations among participants within and across the formal boundaries around intraorganizational units. We derive and test hypotheses regarding the association between organizational vocabularies and interpersonal trust relations among members of the top management team in an international corporation containing five semi-independent subsidiary companies. Our findings suggest a greater propensity for expressing trust among managers who share a common organizational vocabulary. However, the segregating effect of organizational structure confines this tendency within the formal boundaries of organizational units. Notably, this confinement weakens when participants share words aligned with the vocabulary of organizational identity, indicating that trust relations extend beyond formal boundaries when rooted in core organizational values. The study underscores that developing a shared understanding is not sufficient to sustain trust. Trust within hierarchical organizations is more likely to thrive when articulated through core elements of organizational identity, history, and purpose.