Trust Abuse: Conceptualization,Antecedents And Consequence

The definition of trust reflects that trustor is willing to accept vulnerability to trustee's action.Focusing on the vulnerability,we find that trust can be abused.We put forward a new variable—trust abuse and try to conceptualize it.We focus on the abuse of trust and concentrate on interpersonal trust—supervisor's trust in employees.Reference trust repair,we call this phenomenon “trust abuse”.We define trust abuse as “a psychology that subordinates think they can do anything without being punished because they have the relatively high trust of supervisors”.In this study,we use too-much-of-a-good-thing effect,a meta-theoretical principle,to explain the new variable.We also discuss the antecedents and consequence of trust abuse.Based on too-much-of-a-good-thing effect,we put forward five hypotheses.They are: LMXSC has a positive relationship with trust abuse at the team level;trust abuse has a positive relationship with unethical behavior at the team level;the trust abuse mediates the positive relationship between LMXSC and unethical behavior at team level;the positive relationship between trust abuse and unethical team behavior will be moderated by Machiavellianism at team level;the positive relationship between LMXSC at team level and unethical team behavior mediated by trust abuse will be moderated by Machiavellianism at team level.We use four samples to conceptualized trust abuse,including compiling items pool,revising measurement items,exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.We finally get 5 formal items.The items are “My supervisor has a great confidence in me and will have no doubt on me”;“I believe my supervisor trusts me and I can do whatever I want”;“My supervisor often makes me feel secure to rely on trust”;“I believe that no matter what I do,my supervisor will trust me”;“I believe that even if I do something wrong,my supervisor will excuse me”.Before testing our research model,we spend a lot of time doing literature review to find out appropriate scales for the variables in our study.After making decision of the scales,we design the questionnaire and distribute it.The samples are composed of 50 work groups,including 235 employees.We withdraw questionnaires from 45 groups with their 210 employees.We testify reliability of scales aiming to know the consistency,stability,and equivalence of the scales.Conclusively,all scales used in this research have a satisfactory reliability.We use AMOS to do the Confirmatory factor analysis.All indicators meet the requirements of the four factors model and the indicators of the four factors model are the best compared with those of other three models as a whole.The LMXSC,trust abuse,Machiavellianism and unethical team behavior are team-level constructs in our model but measured at individual level.So we do aggregation of this four constructs and we make the conclusion that it is appropriate to aggregate them to group level.We use SPSS to describe four main variables and five control variables at individual level and team level.We apply SPSS to do regression analysis.The result shows that LMXSC is positively related with trust abuse(?=0.394,p<0.01),trust abuse is positively related with unethical team behavior(?=0.345,p<0.001),the relationship between LMXSC and unethical team behavior is not significant(?=0.123,p>0.05).As a result,hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 2 is supported but hypothesis 3 and hypothesis 5 is not established.We apply SPSS to do regression analysis to testify the moderating effect of Machiavellianism on the relationship between trust abuse and unethical team behavior.Results shows that the moderating effect of Machiavellianism on trust abuse and unethical team behavior is significant(?=0.113,p<0.05).As a result,hypothesis 4 is supported.We also use statement of bootstrap method to detect the relationship between the main variables.The results are consistent.In the last of this paper,we explain reasons why the hypotheses are supported or not supported and discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this study and point out future research directions.