Trust within Brazilian New Economy organizations: an empirical investigation of gender effects benchmarked on Brazilian old economy organizations.
| Autor | Zanini, Marco Tulio |
| Cargo | Report |
Introduction
Ripperger (1998, p. 45) offers the following definition of trust:
Trust is the voluntary risk investment in advance, in a relationship under the abdication of explicit safeguard mechanisms of control against opportunistic behavior, in the expectation that the other party, despite of the absence of such safeguards, will not behave opportunistically. This definition is the one that we will adopt for our investigation because, in this conceptualization, control is contingent on trust and trust, as we will argue, is in turn affected by uncertainty. One can imagine, as Ripperger (1998) and Ring and Van de Ven (1994) suggest, that when high levels of trust characterise interpersonal interactions throughout the organization, then the level of control needed through monitoring and the nature of sanctions for dysfunctional opportunistic behaviour will be lower and less severe respectively. The logic of their argument is that the existence of trust within the organization considerably expands the possibility for individuals to form positive cooperative relationships that mitigate against the opportunistic collusive behaviours that often compromise the charge that the organization comply with the laws and regulations relevant in its commercial milieu (Bodnar & Hopwood, 2004, p. 8).
Williamson (1975, p. 45) argues that trust is also affected by uncertainty. He asserts that uncertainty leads naturally to unpredictability and thus makes opportunism difficult to control because firms would find it difficult to write employment contracts in which all of the dynamic contingencies are specified. Therefore, in the presence of such uncertainty, one expects that the level of trust will be lower and, consequently, requires a higher level of monitoring to control the anticipated opportunistic behaviour.
The plan of this study, therefore, is to see if there are trust differentials that are gender related; if this is the case then one may anticipate or assume that the organization may be at risk for opportunistic behaviour contingent on gender. This risk exposure would then rationalize the commitment of resources to monitor those situations where one anticipates more exposure. How such monitoring should take place is of course another issue. We are only addressing the gender-trust issue and suggesting, depending on the findings, the control implications given the possibility of differential exposure which is dependent on gender. With this baseline definitional information, let us now examine the economic sector labelled as the New Economy in order to set the context for our gender study of trust.
The New Economy and Our Benchmark: the Old Economy
According to the International Labour Office [ILO], the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development [OECD] (ILO, 1998, 2001, 2002; Standing, 1997), Perrons (2002) and Perrons, Fagan, McDowell, Ray and Ward (2006, p. 2), the information and telecommunication industries, hereafter ITC, have been labelled as principal members in the sector now called the New Economy, principally due to their high levels of market uncertainty and their organizational instability. According to the ILO and the OECD, in the ITC sector, market uncertainties are relatively high due to: (1) globalisation, (2) the rapid development of new products thus dramatically shortening the obsolesce cycle, (3) the establishment of companies financed by short-term venture capital funding, (4) the ongoing and often misguided process of regulation in particular the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, (Lusk, Schmidt, & Halperin, 2006), and (5) failures in demand forecasts. Fransman (2002, p. 33) notes that "mistakes are an inevitable consequence of the irreducible uncertainty which always shrouds complex events such as those which occurred in the Telecom Industry in the Internet Age".
These factors have precipitated changes in the nature of work in companies of the ITC sector. For example, Burton-Jones (1999) and Neumark and Reed (2002), considering the work conditions in the New Economy, observe that volatility and the shortened tenure of employment contracts have adversely impacted trust relationships. Burton-Jones comments: "employers and employees will be increasingly wary of entering into agreements which contain implicit guarantees or promises". Consistent with Williamson (1975), Burton-Jones (1999, p. 53) further offers that
this lack of mutual trust caused by such uncertainty will continue to weaken the value of the employment contract as a form of work arrangement and move the employment relationship away from its relational context towards a more explicit transactional model. In a similar vein, according to Audretsch and Thurik (2001, p. 15), the degree of uncertainty and turnover experienced by workers in the New Economy is a window to the great turbulence and instability of the firms in this sector. Replacing long-term fixed contracts with new flexible forms of contingent work contracts provides the essential vehicle driving the transition from the Old Economy to the New Economy resulting in increasing levels of uncertainty. Furthermore, Argandona (2003, p. 17) suggests that this characteristic of the New Economy, combined with other environmental elements, has radically changed the work conditions towards more conflicts in the work environment, higher internal cut-throat competition and disintegration of loyalty; they have also encouraged opportunistic and unethical behaviour. Argandona observes that the New Economy firms are usually companies with a younger workforce and are marked by high employee turnover due to the constant re-dimensioning of the workforce through layoffs and outsourcing. Concerning the Old Economy, Argandona (2003) and Burton-Jones (1999) characterize the Old Economy, in comparison to the ITC sector, as a sector of firms whose workers have long-term labor contracts and show more loyalty and attachment to the company--i.e., by most measures, the polar-extreme to the New Economy. This is the reason that we have decided to benchmark our gender study of the New Economy using the firms sampled from the Old Economy. It is also interesting to note that, based upon a comprehensive ABI and Business Source Premier databases search, last effected 8 September 2008, there were no articles retrieved that reported on sampled gender-trust issues from New Economy firms. Therefore, our study is the first to provide such information. Consider now the study design by which we will address the question of gender and trust in the New Economy.
The Trust Study
Study Design and Sample
To investigate the trust-gender relationships in the New Economy, we surveyed members of six Brazilian firms: three from the ITC sector, and three firms one each from the mining, petrochemical and the steel sectors. We used as the survey instrument, the Behavioural Trust Inventory [BTI] developed by Gillespie (2003).
Criteria for Classification of the Study Organizations
For sample validation purposes, we blind-classified the six study firms into two groups using two different techniques. First, based upon the similarity of the firms' performance as reported as part of the public information that Brazilian firms are required to publish, we clustered the six firms into two groups; and second, two experienced Brazilian financial analysts were asked to group the six firms into what they believed to be typical firms in the New and Old Economies. For example, regarding the classification by reported performance, we used average employee turnover as one of the performance statistics. The three firms with highest employee turnover ranged from 16.9 % to 39.0%, whereas the range of the firms with the lowest employee turnover was 3.0% to 4.7%. The firms in the high turnover cluster were the ITC firms, and the firms in the low turnover group were the mining, petrochemical and steel firms. By both methods, two groups were produced: the three ITC firms grouped together--we label them as our New Economy sample--and, the mining, petrochemical and steel firms grouped together and labelled as the Old Economy sample. We have thus validated that the firms that we selected from the ITC sector fit the profile of New Economy firms and are different from the firms that best fit the profile of the Old Economy--our benchmark group.
The Survey Instrument
The selected questionnaire, called the Behavioral Trust Inventory [BTI], was designed by Nicole Gillespie from the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, Australia. The trust scale was specifically designed to assess the willingness to be vulnerable in interpersonal work relationships. The instrument was designed to assess interpersonal trust in the work relationships between leaders and their followers, and among peers. The inventory has also been used to assess leaders' and members' trust towards their work team.
The BTI was specifically designed to assess one's willingness to be vulnerable in interpersonal work relationships; this fits well with Ripperger's definition cited above. There are 30 questions in total, each one measured on a standard Likert scale. The Likert scale labels for all the questions in the BTI are: '1' is labelled Not at all willing and '7' is labelled as Completely willing. The first ten questions deal with interpersonal trust between the respondents and their Supervisor, the next ten assess interpersonal trust between the respondent and a particular Peer, and the last ten questions address interpersonal trust between the respondents and their Team. Moreover, the trust scales for each interpersonal associational group are divided into two factor groups. The first five questions for each of the three groups: Supervisor, Peer and Team address trust within specific work-related situations, called the Reliance or Professional dimension; the last five questions per group are designed to measure trust at a personal level, called the Disclosure or...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃOCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
