Trust as an Organizing Principle

Although research on trust in an organizational context has advanced considerably in recent years, the literature has yet to produce a set of generalizable propositions that inform our understanding of the organization and coordination of work. We propose that conceptualizing trust as an organizing principle is a powerful way of integrating the diverse trust literature and distilling generalizable implications for how trust affects organizing. We develop the notion of trust as an organizing principle by specifying structuring and mobilizing as two sets of causal pathways through which trust influences several important properties of organizations. We further describe specific mechanisms within structuring and…