Measuring trust inside organisations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which measures and operationalisations of intra‐organisational trust reflect the essential elements of the existing conceptualisation of trust inside the workplace.Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an overview of the essential points from the rich variety of competing conceptualisations and definitions in the management and organisational literatures. It draws on this overview to present a framework of issues for researchers to consider when designing research based on trust. This framework is then used to analyse the content of 14 recently published empirical measures of intra‐organisational trust. It is noted for each measure the form that trust takes, the content, the sources of evidence and the identity of the recipient, as well as matters related to the wording of items.Findings – The paper highlights where existing measures match the theory, but also shows a number of “blind‐spots” or contradictions, particularly over the...