Interdependence Based Trust And It's Impact On Cooperation

Cooperation is important for good performance, so how to make employees cooperate more becomes a key topic for both managers and researchers. As we all know, trust contributes a lot to cooperative behavior. Also, by trusting partners, people can interactive in a simple way, decrease the cost of monitor, and make actions more flexible. So how to build a trust relationship becomes the key point to improve cooperative behavior. Interdependence theory proposes two kinds of interdependence as the basis of partners'trust, mutuality of dependence and covariance of interests. In this paper, we carried out a series of studies to discuss the influence of partners' interdependence on trust and cooperative behavior.Study 1 used behavioral event interview and qualitative analysis to explore the factors influence trust. The result showed that help and commission appeared the most frequently in groups. The relationship of people was important for all four types of interviewee. In close relationship, people focus their attention on relation maintaining, and behave in a trust way; on the contrary, people behave according rules. To judge the of relationship employees, people always consider both the situational and the emotional factors. Emotional factors were more important for the old fellows, and the group boundary is more important for new employees. The result of the qualitative research approved the importance of the relationship for trust behavior, and the interdependence in group was very important for the judgment of relationship.Study 2 and 3 discussed the relationship of interdependence and trust. Study 2 manipulated the mutuality of dependence of the two subjects to explore the influence of the interdependence on trust in the interaction time dimensionality. The result showed that when subjects know they would interact in next trust game, the level of trust would be high. But when they know the interaction would be ended, the level of trust declined obviously. Study 3 manipulated the covariance of interests by income sharing and competing group to analyze the relation of interests based interdependence and trust. The result showed that under the competing group condition, subjects kept a high level of trust no matter the interaction restricting existed or not. While under the income sharing condition, trust obviously declined when the restricting relationship ended. This result approved that different interdependence relationship differed in both intension and stability. Trust based on different interdependence was also different.Based on the importance of trust for cooperation, Study 4 simulated two typical interdependence relationship (high interdependence vs. low interdependence) to explore the relation of interdependence based trust and cooperation. The results showed that different interdependence could activate specific social motivation and affect the trust belief. Both the social motivation and the trust belief affect cooperative behavior, but when both two variables put into the equation, the regression coefficient of the social motivation was not significant. In study 4, we proved interdependence based trust effected cooperative behavior.Study 5 analyzed the relation of the interdependence based trust, feedback and cooperation. By manipulating different feedback information and interdependence, we approved that people's reaction to feedback differed under different interdependence, so did their explanation about these feedback information. The analysis of the relationship between trust belief and cooperation under different interdependence showed that there was a strong relationship between the trust belief and cooperation when the interdependence was high; while the relationship was weakened when the interdependence was relatively low.In conclusion, based on interdependence theory, this study developed a systemic and dynamic model to explore the relationship of interdependence on trust and cooperation.