Plain Sailing or Choppy Water? Maintaining Interpersonal Trusting Relationships in Times of Uncertainty

Abstract

Interpersonal trusting relationships frequently experience relational threats that require both parties to engage actively in trust maintenance efforts. Yet, trust research has tended to focus on trust formation, or trust repair in the case of a violation, and offers us little insight regarding how these more ambiguous threats to trusting relationships are experienced and overcome relationally. To provide novel insight on this topic, this exploratory study gathers dyadic interview data from 26 manager–employee trusting relationships regarding their experience of relational threats and their proactive efforts to overcome these negative relational experiences. Findings show that the experience of a relational threat triggers a three-stage trust maintenance process that includes an assessment phase, an active maintenance phase, and an outcome phase. Threats are assessed at the individual level via cognitive and affective sensemaking, while trust maintenance efforts (creating a shared mental model, cognitive and structural reassurance, and dyadic problem solving) require dyadic counterparts to act with mutual agency to overcome the relational threat and avoid a loss of trust. Trust maintenance processes support dyads to either maintain or strengthen their existing trusting relationships. Our findings advance our theoretical understanding of interpersonal trust maintenance by demonstrating that this process unfolds across three phases and can lead to different outcomes for dyads’ trusting relationships. We offer practical guidelines to safeguard existing trusting relationships, as well as a new agenda for trust scholars to extend our theorizing.