Employee perceptions of trust in managers of different gender
Date
2008-03-17T11:37:56Z
Authors
Gunpath, Dheshni
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Abstract
ABSTRACT
Trust is a central component in leadership and has been shown to be
associated with employee commitment, motivation and performance. The
phenomenon has been investigated at the organisational level and there have
been previous studies of trust within the manager/subordinate relationship.
However, research in this area within the South African environment has been
limited.
The present research investigates the trust displayed by employees in relation
to their immediate managers and explores this relationship from a gender
perspective. As women are still not well represented at management level and
as perceptions of male and female managers tend to differ, the purpose of
this study is to determine whether perceptions of male and female managers
differ in terms of trust. The aims of the study are to assess whether there are
differences with regard to the trust that employees place in managers of
differing gender, as well as to assess whether there are differences in the
trust displayed by employees of differing gender.
The methodology of the study is based on analysis of questionnaires
distributed within a large company in the retail environment. The instrument
used is a Trust measure developed by Daniel McAllister (1995). Initial
analyses were undertaken to establish Cronbach Alphas on both sub-scales
of the Trust measure. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to
establish whether responses to the questionnaire loaded on the same
subscales identified in the original McAllister study. The main analyses were
then carried out using t-tests and Analysis of Covariance, in order to control
for a number of potentially confounding variables in the study. The results
indicate that males and females display an equal propensity to trust. In
addition, male and female managers are viewed no differently in terms of
trustworthiness. There are also no significant trust differences when same
gender relationships were compared to cross gender relationships between
managers and employees. However, manager age and the length of time that
the employee knows a manager were found to be significant covariates.
Description
Keywords
Trust, Gender, Employee perceptions, Organizational trust