Navigating the Life Cycle of Trust in Developing Economies: One‐size Solutions Do Not Fit All

Published date01 June 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12053
Date01 June 2015
Navigating the Life Cycle of
Trust in Developing
Economies: One-size Solutions
Do Not Fit All
LAURA PINCUS HARTMAN, JULIE GEDRO AND
COURTNEY MASTERSON
ABSTRACT
Trust is critical to the development and maintenance of
collaborative and cohesive relationships in societies,
broadly, and in organizations, specifically. At the same
time, trust is highly dependent on the social context in
which it occurs. Unfortunately, existing research involv-
ing trust remains somewhat limited to a particular set of
developed economies, providing a window to explore a
culture’s stage of economic development as a key con-
textual determinant of trust within organizations. In this
article, we review the state of the scholarship on trust
and identify those qualities of trust that are common in
organizations at similar stages of economic development,
At the time of submission, Laura Pincus Hartman was Vincent de Paul Professor of Business
Ethics at DePaul University, Chicago, IL. She currently serves as Director of the Susilo
Institute for Ethics in the Global Economy at Boston University, Boston, MA and is an
associated professor at Kedge Business School, Marseille, France. She is the author of over 90
journal articles, books and cases on issues involving cross-sector (for-profit/non-profit) part-
nerships toward global poverty alleviation, business ethics, CSR, social justice, employment
law, discrimination and equity. E-mail: LHartman@depaul.edu. Julie Gedro is an Associate
Professor of Business, Management and Economics at Empire State College/State Univer-
sity of New York. She is the author of Lipstick or Golf Clubs: What Lesbians Understand
About Success and What You Can Learn from Them (2014) as well as articles on issues of
LGBT workplace equality, leadership and career development. E-mail: Julie.Gedro@esc.edu.
Courtney R. Masterson is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s
Department of Managerial Studies. Her research addresses issues of ethics, justice, and
inequality within organizations. E-mail: czegar2@uic.edu.
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Business and Society Review 120:2 167–204
© 2015 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.,
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
referred to as its etic aspects. We then also distinguish
those elements of trust that are, to the contrary, cultur-
ally specific or emic in nature. We structure our discus-
sion around the “life cycle of trust” (i.e., the creation,
maintenance, and postfracture repair of trust) and con-
sider unique factors in its application to developing
economies. In doing so, we ground our examination in
expository examples through field experience in Haiti. We
conclude with the proposal of a framework for future
research oriented toward the resolution of remaining
theoretical and empirical queries as they relate to trust
in developing economies.
INTRODUCTION
Sometimes we, as scholars, face pragmatic imperatives for
which we do not have answers. So we faithfully turn to our
colleagues and their tomes of research to inform our
actions, relying on knowledge to piece together solutions.
However, every so often we find that, while existing scholarship
may offer compass points, there is insufficient detail to provide us
with a realistic map toward the answers we need. The current
study presents a case of field experience in connection with cross-
cultural trust building in a developing economy—Haiti—that con-
fronted distinct challenges. These hurdles involved efforts to
embed trust in organizational culture, sharp bidirectional trust
fractures, and subsequent efforts at trust repair. Questions
central to trust arose in this context of a highly salient, albeit
developing economy. For example, in a socioeconomic environ-
ment where trust is not entirely supported by the surrounding
culture, what factors are imperative to creating and maintaining
trust? Are breaches of trust more likely to occur in this environ-
ment since the embedded vulnerability of each party is more
acute, and therefore, the perceived risk is higher? Ultimately, how
should an organization respond to a trust disruption in an envi-
ronment where trust is not supported?
Certainly, there have been studies that have demonstrated the
integral role that local culture plays in fostering trust—most
notably with regard to a country’s classification as either collec-
168 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW
tivist or individualist, or according to its quality of power distance
(Casimir et al. 2006; Wasti et al. 2007). Yet, these studies have
remained conspicuously grounded in a North American setting
(e.g., Dirks and Ferrin 2002) or have expanded only to larger
“Western” or “Northern” contexts (Gillespie et al. 2014; Stahl et al.
2011). In this article, however, we propose that, in addition to
these variances in culture, the stage of a community’s economic
development also is a highly relevant feature of impact in trust
relationships, and it is this aspect of trust relationships in emerg-
ing economies that has remained largely unexplored. Specifically,
we identify the unique dilemmas that trust presents for and
within organizations in developing or emerging economies, includ-
ing and beyond Haiti, as one illustrative example of an emerging
economy. We orient our discussion around the experience of one
organization in Haiti and then ground that experience in “life cycle
of trust,” that is, the creation,maintenance, and postfracture
repair of trust.1We conclude by revealing those cavities where
existing solutions or guidance from scholarship may remain
incomplete or off target in this environment.
At first blush, the focus on Haiti, or even on developing econo-
mies, might seem hyper-geo-specific, representing unique cultural
qualities that are not necessarily imputable to any other country
or circumstances. However, probing deeper, one learns that Haiti’s
stage of economic development is common to other cultures and
therefore allows us to compare those shared qualities, as well as
to problematize its economy vis-à-vis the life cycle of trust (Hsiung
2012). Exploring trust within its local frame is valuable since
trust relationships do not function devoid of their social contexts,
and culturally specific elements must be taken into account in
order to grasp the most complete understanding of the basis of
trust in relationships (Ferrin et al. 2006). Scholars advocate both
a culture-specific or emic construct of trust, in addition to an etic
or universalist perspective (Wasti and Tan 2010; Zaheer and
Zaheer 2006). Emic and etic approaches are indeed complemen-
tary; “the first without the second gets stuck in case studies that
cannot be generalized, the second, without the first in abstrac-
tions that cannot be related to real life” (Fontaine and Richardson
2003; citing Hofstede 1998, p. 19). We argue that while culture-
specific differences may result in emic variances among trust
qualities, the stage of a culture’s economic development is
169HARTMAN, GEDRO, AND MASTERSON

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