How Organizations Influence Interpersonal Trust Repair: The Case of a French Antiterrorist Unit

Abstract

Organizations that increasingly rely on interdependent teams, such as project teams, often imply work that is important, improvisational, and interdependent. However, these are the very same task conditions where trust is most fragile and in need of repair. As a result, organizations may wish to intervene in repairing interpersonal trust among members. Through an inductive qualitative study of a French antiterrorist unit, we move beyond dyadic treatments of interpersonal trust repair to theorize a model that elucidates the organizational practices that can be used to guide members through the trust repair process. We also induce core mechanisms, such as establishing trust violation rules and providing trust templates, that explain why these organizational practices work to repair interpersonal trust. We suggest how this organizationally directed trust repair process can lead to full, partial, or failed trust repair for trust violators, with consequences on whether and how these violators may be reintegrated into the organization. We conclude by discussing the contributions of our research on trust repair, as well as on how organizations treat organizational wrongdoers, and suggest several avenues for future research.