Trust: theoretical framework, underlying disciplines, and measures

Today it is necessary to study trust considering the characteristics of the environment in which organizations operate. The relevance of the concept is more than justified, as much for the academic world as for the organizational practice. On one hand, the extant amount of literature shows its importance in the academic scope. And, on the other hand, since organizations are more and more concerned with replacing conflict management by the use of cooperative behaviours, trust becomes a key element. Trust is a multidisciplinary, heterogeneous and ambiguous construct. There is a lot of literature about it in different fields. Despite all research on trust to date, it so far impossible to reach an agreement concerning a consensual paradigm about conceptualisation, theoretical framework and underlying disciplines, levels of analysis, unit of analysis, generating factors and consequences. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of trust, through a literature review and a content analysis about: theoretical framework according their purpose of study; conceptualisation, generating factors and consequences. The sources for this analysis are papers published at the three EURAM Conferences (2001, 2002 and 2003), as well as, the special issues on trust published by three prestigious journals, such as the Academy of Management Review (1998), Organization Studies (2001), and Organization Science (2003). These conferences and journals are taken as basis for this study as they have explicitly shown a particular interest in the understanding of the trust concept.