SIMILAR JOB BACKGROUNDS MAY MEAN LESS TRUST IN WORKPLACE
ROLLA, Mo. -- Managers responsible for assigning employees to project teams may find that people with similar job backgrounds don't trust each other as much as they do co-workers with other backgrounds, a University of Missouri-Rolla researcher suggests.
In a study of MBA students working together in small groups, Tony Ammeter, a member of the UMR engineering management faculty, found that people with similar job backgrounds were less likely to trust others from the same background than they were people from other areas of employment.
"In cross-functional teams, this somewhat curious finding might be explained as a by-product of a desire to be the sole holder of expert power in one's area of expertise," Ammeter says in a paper to be presented Nov. 9 to the Southern Management Association.
The levels of mistrust "seemed to dampen as time passed," Ammeter adds, "suggesting that if these undercurrents of competition exist initially, they decrease as the coworkers coalesce to perform their tasks."
The paper, "Demography, Social Contact, and Trust Among Coworkers in Project Groups," is based on Ammeter's dissertation for his Ph.D. in organization science from the University of Texas at Austin. The SMA will present Ammeter with its 2000 SMA Outstanding Doctoral Paper Award at the conference.
In conducting his research, Ammeter studied teams of first-year MBA students who worked together over four months to complete class assignments. Adjusting the teams to maximize diversity of gender, race, age, occupational background, industry experience and undergraduate major, Ammeter surveyed team members to see how demographics, social contact and employment experience affected levels of trust among the subjects.
He found that racial similarity is important in developing trust at the beginning of a relationship in a team environment, and that social contact increased levels of trust. But he was surprised to discover that job similarity had a negative affect on trust.
"Work environments are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of gender, race, work background and experience," says Ammeter. "The increased diversity in project teams reflects this trend."
Increasing the levels of social contact at the beginning of a project through activities such as "kick-off" sessions may help increase trust levels, Ammeter says.
"Similarly, if people with similar work backgrounds or expertise areas feel threatened, clearly detailing the responsibilities of each party so that neither feels in competition with another may help alleviate this problem," he adds.
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