The Focal Points of Trust

A number of analytic and empirical studies (largely undertaken with student samples) have demonstrated that trust can be effectively decomponentialised. This process (as the references above to Dibben's work indicate) focuses interactors' attention on how trust works in a given situation. Jarvenpaa and Leidner's work clearly indicates that trust may be explored by examining a number of critical factors in interpersonal interactions, such as roles and responsibilities, transparency and responsiveness. These factors may be described as "focal points" for trust. We suggest that if potential partners address these in the early stages of partnership formation, their subsequent collaboration will be more trustful and less prone to breakdown. The heading of this section of the chapter is borrowed from Nissenbaum's (1995) "Focus of emotion," a pioneering attempt to provide a structural framework for modelling affect. We suggest that by describing the "focus of trust" in terms of "focal points" that characterise a number of typical business situations, we can address some of the problems of establishing how trust may be formed where there is no "prior history" or cumulation of experience. Commonality of experience may compensate for lack of prior history.

At this point it may be useful to discuss the work of McKnight et al. (1995), who offer a comprehensive and informative analysis of "trust formation in new organizational relationships." Trust, say the authors, is based on four beliefs about others: their benevolence, their honesty, their competence and their predictability. The trust formation process early in the relationship is indicative of trust later in a relationship (p. 19), and five factors will affect the early formation of trust: dispositional trust, situational trust, the categorization mechanisms of interactors, illusory trust and system trust. Dispositional trust is salient only in situations that are highly ambiguous, novel or unstructured and that offer few cues about what is going on. It is invoked if no more specific information is available. As our focus here is trust for partnerships in a business environment, where schemas and genres to some extent drive judgements about who and what is appropriate, we suggest that dispositional trust may be disregarded as a key component in design rationale.

In contrast, a set of factors that McKnight et al. (1995) describe as "categorization mechanisms" is of great pertinence to those who seek to represent trust. These include categorization by reputation and "unit grouping," or the process of alignment (p. 30) that allows an interactor to perceive strangers/others as part of his or her own group, and thus to infer that those others have shared assumptions. We suggest that McKnight's "categorization mechanisms" may be the basis of a systematic framework to present the focal points of trust, and, in addition, that recent work on the formation (Iacono & Weisband, 1997) and maintenance of teams (Steinfield et al., 1998) can substantiate the framework. Iacono and Weisband (1997) describe a project with distributed electronic teams, who must "quickly develop and maintain trust relationships with people that they hardly know, and may never meet again, with the goal of producing interdependent work." The time frame for the projects was 24 days. In this situation, say the authors, trust is less about relating than doing, as swift trust is "less an interpersonal form than a cognitive and action form" (p. 1). Temporary systems require quick mutual adjustments so that people can innovate as required; in online work, technology must support this process. Good communication habits and the ability to multi-task and handle remote requests while attending to local demands are key practices.

Active participation may be seen, say the authors, as a system of initiations and responses. Initiations involve trust, because they "make one's preferences public" (which may incur risk). Each initiation strengthens participants' perceptions that trust is reasonable and incurs more initiations. The making of responses "signals and inspires trust" in the group (p. 2). Action moves forward in a cycle of initiations and responses. We suggest that this activity is an appropriate source of trust representations. In Iacono and Weisband's (1997) empirical study, initiations were categorized as "getting together," "workprocess," "work-content," "work-technical," "needing-contact," and "funtalk." Work-process and work-content initiations correlated with high performance, as did number of total initiations, and the pattern of timing. Within the project period, team members formed enough social information about each other to reinforce initial trust levels. Age correlated with high performance, and the authors suggest that age may be linked to multi-tasking.

Weisband draws on extensive work by Steinfield et al. (1999) on the design of a collaborative platform for teamwork called Teamscope. This suggests that transparency, presence and awareness are critical components in successful online work. Weisband (2003) has summarized a subsequent study (15 teams in two universities): low performing teams rely on their perceptions of others as a predictor of good performance; high performing teams rely on what people do and say as a predictor of good performance … teams who may not engage in the hard work of doing distant collaboration may feel good about the process and each other, but such perceptions do not lead to successful outcomes. Activity awareness information (or knowing what actions are underway at any given moment) is important, as is availability awareness or knowing whether others can meet or take part in an activity. Process awareness allows people to see where they fit at any give time and how the project is moving along, and perspective awareness gives information (about beliefs and values, for example) that is helpful for making sense of actions.

We suggest that micro-level "shared situational awareness," borrowing a term from macro-level studies of teambuilding in the US Defense forces (Loughran, 2000) that is based on Weisband's work, may be a useful element of any trust representation, as actual monitoring of progress contributes more to high performance than feelings about others. In an analogous study of "antecedents" to trust exploring perceptions of others' ability, integrity and benevolence, Jarvenpaa et al. (1998) found that perceptions of others' integrity were important to initial trust, and that perceptions of benevolence were least important. [Readers who are interested in trust models based on interaction are referred to a number of studies of trust that have been collected by Castelfranchi and Tan (2001) in a recent edited volume. A comparable series of studies at the Electrical Engineering Department at Imperial College of Science, Medicine and Technology, London, can be accessed at the alfebiite website (alfebiite, n.d.).]