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The Nature Of Trust: Conceptual And Operational Clarification, Donna M. Romano

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The importance of trust in working relationships is widely acknowledged among organizational researchers and practitioners. Unfortunately, trust is defined and measured differently across studies, making it difficult to integrate and compare research findings. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to clarify the nature of trust as it exists across research and organizational settings. First, trust was conceptualized in terms of 10 defining characteristics based on a convergence and reconciliation of inconsistencies among existing definitions. These 10 characteristics of trust were incorporated into a single definition of trust to offer a more comprehensive description of the construct. Second, the Functional …