Trickle-down effect of organizational trust on co-worker trust: The moderating role of cultural dissimilarity and relationship length

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated trends of globalization and digitaliza-tion, making geographically dispersed teams a common practice in firms. Despitebenefits derived from the members’diversity, such teams are also prone to trustdeficiency. Advancing prior research, this study focuses on links between multiplereferents of trust. We draw on halo and priming effects to suggest that employees’trust toward their organization could trickle-down to trust in their co-workers.Moreover, we highlight the moderating role of cultural dissimilarity and relation-ship length. Analyzing 317 relationships between Turkish employees and their co-workers of Turkish and German cultural background, we present evidence for atrickle-down effect of organizational trust on trust in co-workers. We also findthat the trickle-down effect of trust is stronger when cultural dissimilarity is highthan when it is low, suggesting that trust in the organizations may outweigh cul-tural barriers that could hamper trust between co-workers.