Research On Relationship Between Individualism\Collectivism And Organizational Trust

Globalization of the world economy,the development of transnational corporations and the emergence of regional economic organizations,all of that made the cultural comparative study between differences organizations be one of the hot researches in the late 20th century.The individualism and collectivism as one of the cultural differences,academia on it still exists different point of view,one was one-dimension with two poles,and another was multi-dimension.At the same time,accompanied by economic globalization,organizational change,organizational mergering,restructuring and process reengineering,organizations flating had becoming more.Organizational trust had been the focused topic of Psychologist,Histologist and Economist.How to improve the organizational trust of staff,and which factors impact the organizational trust,that had become today's the hot research topic.In this paper,we adopt Triandis's multi-dimensional individualism\collectivism concept(that is,horizontal individualism,vertical individualism,horizontal collectivism and vertical collectivism),use the organizational trust's three dimensions (that is,trust of staff to staff,trust of staff to supervisor and trust of staff to organization),and research the relationship between individualism\collectivism and organizational trust.Due to personal reasons of living and working experience,I found that between the state-owned enterprises and the foreign-funded enterprise,the organization culture should be great different and the individual\collectivism would also be of differentiation.At the same time,organizational trust may also differ.Therefore,I hope further explore whether there has differentiation between state-owned enterprises and foreign enterprises in individual\collectivism and in the organizational trust. This study first used literature review on individual \collectivism and organization trust, then using questionnaire to 304 employees of foreign-funded enterprises and state-owned enterprise in Chongqing and Shenzhen.The statistical analysis used standardized statistical software SPSS 13.0.The main conclusions are as follows:Ⅰ.The self made-up questionnaire of the individual\collectivism had good reliability and validity in this study.Ⅱ.Verified Triandis's the multi-dimensional individual \collectivism theory(including horizontal individualism,vertical individualism,horizontal collectivism and vertical collectivism),and proved Hofstede's one dimension with two polars was incorrect.Ⅲ.The trust of staff to supervisor,staff to staff and staff to organization had moderate correlation.Supervisor trust affected organizational trust most and the supervisor was the key role about organizational trust.Ⅳ.The horizontal individualism and organizational trust did not significantly relate. The vertical individualism and organizational trust had significant negative correlation. The horizontal collectivism and organizational trust significantly related.The vertical collectivism and organizational trust significantly related.Ⅴ.The horizontal individualism and vertical individualism of foreign-funded enterprises were significantly higher than that of State-owned enterprises.The horizontal collectivism of state-owned enterprises was significantly higher than that of foreign-funded enterprises.The vertical collectivism between foreign-funded enterprises and state-owned enterprises had no significant different.Ⅵ.The organization trust of state-owned enterprises was significantly higher than that of foreign-funded enterprises.Further more,the staff to staff trust of state-owned enterprises was higher than that of foreign-funded enterprises.