Employee perceptions of trust in managers of different gender
ABSTRACTTrust is a central component in leadership and has been shown to beassociated with employee commitment, motivation and performance. Thephenomenon has been investigated at the organisational level and there havebeen previous studies of trust within the manager/subordinate relationship.However, research in this area within the South African environment has beenlimited.The present research investigates the trust displayed by employees in relationto their immediate managers and explores this relationship from a genderperspective. As women are still not well represented at management level andas perceptions of male and female managers tend to differ, the purpose ofthis study is to determine whether perceptions of male and female managersdiffer in terms of trust. The aims of the study are to assess whether there aredifferences with regard to the trust that employees place in managers ofdiffering gender, as well as to assess whether there are differences in thetrust displayed by employees of differing gender.The methodology of the study is based on analysis of questionnairesdistributed within a large company in the retail environment. The instrumentused is a Trust measure developed by Daniel McAllister (1995). Initialanalyses were undertaken to establish Cronbach Alphas on both sub-scalesof the Trust measure. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted toestablish whether responses to the questionnaire loaded on the samesubscales identified in the original McAllister study. The main analyses werethen carried out using t-tests and Analysis of Covariance, in order to controlfor a number of potentially confounding variables in the study. The resultsindicate that males and females display an equal propensity to trust. Inaddition, male and female managers are viewed no differently in terms oftrustworthiness. There are also no significant trust differences when samegender relationships were compared to cross gender relationships betweenmanagers and employees. However, manager age and the length of time thatthe employee knows a manager were found to be significant covariates.
Year of publication: |
2008-03-17
|
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Authors: | Gunpath, Dheshni |
Subject: | Trust | Gender | Employee perceptions | Organizational trust |
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freely available
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