The newcomer's path to trust: Trust -building strategies, experienced trust, and employee engagement among newly -hired employees

Research on workplace trust has focused heavily on the antecedents and consequences of employees' trust in managers. This emphasis serves managers well, providing information that may help them gain trust from the employees they lead. This focus, however, limits our understanding of interpersonal trust in the workplace because it omits the reality that employees also work to build trust with their managers and their coworkers. This dissertation centers primarily on employees' experiences with trust-building. Exploring the experience of workplace newcomers, this dissertation examines two underdeveloped areas in trust research: (1) employee trust-building strategies; and (2) the experience and consequences of being trusted by one's manager and coworkers.;This research project includes two related studies to help understand trust dynamics among newcomers. Study 1 used focus group interviews to build a taxonomy of newcomer trust-building strategies, including strategies newcomers used with their managers and ones they used with their coworkers. Study 2 applied and validated this taxonomy using a quantitative survey administered to 633 newcomers at the Microsoft Corporation. In addition, Study 2 investigated relationships between reported newcomer trust-building strategies, experienced trust (a concept introduced and developed in this study), and employee engagement attitudes including job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, and self-efficacy. The reported use of trust-building strategies with managers was found to be an important predictor of experienced manager trust. Similarly, higher levels of trust-building strategies with coworkers predicted greater experienced coworker trust. Increases in experienced manager trust were found to be positively associated with newcomers' job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and self-efficacy. Increases in experienced coworker trust were positively related to organizational commitment and self-efficacy, but not to job satisfaction. Implications of these results for research and practice were discussed.