Trust: The role of cultural, sectoral and contextual norms in workplace relationships

EAWOP Small Group Meeting

“Trust: The role of cultural, sectoral and contextual norms in workplace relationships"

📅 September 3rd & 4th 2026

🏫 Dublin City University, Glasnevin Campus, Dublin, Ireland https://www.dcu.ie/

This small group meeting aims to advance psychological theory regarding #trust expectations and norms in the workplace. It seeks to facilitate a cross-disciplinary dialogue that sheds light on how cultural, sectoral and contextual norms can influence how trust is shaped, interpreted, and enacted across different organizational contexts.

If you’re an academic, researcher, doctoral student, or practitioner, and you're interested in the topic of trust within and between organisations, we would be delighted to hear from you.

Conference Theme and Scope

The concept of trust, a willingness to be vulnerable to others based on positive expectations, is central to how we experience our workplace and relationships with our colleagues, leaders and organizations (Dirks & de Jong, 2022; Kramer & Tyler, 1996; Searle et al., 2018). Evidence suggests that trust is important for a range of outcomes, from performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels (e.g., Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012) to well-being (Poulin & Haase, 2015) and organizational citizenship behaviour (Dirks & Ferrin, 2001; Legood et al., 2021). Empirical evidence accumulated over the last 30 years has established trust as a core concept in organizational psychology, a foundational building block for organizing and experiencing our workplaces, and a topic on which there continues to be room for theoretical development and advances in our understanding (Dirks & de Jong,
2022; Legood et al., 2023).

Trust has also become a core strategic priority for Europe, a critical resource in enabling policies and goals of social cohesion, geopolitical stability, and meaningful work in the context of fast paced change in technology. In recognition of this, a focus on trust appears regularly in EU legislation and strategy (EU Regulation 2024/1689), and there is an increasing recognition that the context in which we live and interact influences how much and whom we trust (Joint Research Centre, 2025). The EAWOP community have made an important contribution to supporting Europe in better understanding trust in the organizational context and during the period from 2021-2015 the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology and Organizational Psychology Review have published over thirty papers focused on this topic. At a policy impact level, EAWOP’s Impact Incubator has incorporated trust into its efforts to inform evidence-based practice under the umbrellas of threat and security at work and achieving decent work for employees. Developing our understanding of the psychological processes underpinning trust is timely and important to advancing the goals of work and organizational psychologists across Europe as well as European society more broadly.

The social and relational context of work is widely recognised as important in shaping how we experience our workplace and the well-being and performance of individuals and organizations (Meneghel et al., 2016; Tran et al., 2018). It can also create contexts that facilitate the targeting of some employees while enabling and protecting their abusers (Searle & Garippa, 2025). Yet most trust theory and research assume underlying values and perceptions of trust processes that are assumed to apply consistently to all situations and contexts. Individualism-collectivism has been identified as a difference influencing trust (Ferrin & Gillespie, 2010), but a deeper understanding of how culture impacts trust processes has yet to be developed (Fulmer & van der Werff, 2025), and this area has been highlighted as a priority for trust research (Dirks & de Jong, 2022; Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012). 

Challenging the assumption that trust expectations and norms for signalling trustworthiness and making decisions to trust are relatively universal, our SGM aims to explore how norms and expectations for trust and trust related behaviours might differ across cultural, sectoral and contextual boundaries.

Furthermore, there is increasing consensus that the concept of distrust is distinct from the concept of low trust (Saunders et al., 2014; Sitkin & Bijlsma-Frankema, 2018; Six & Latusek, 2023), which offers a fruitful area for trust research. In relation to the context of cultural and social norms, polarization of views and differences of opinion in areas such as politics and social attitudes are becoming increasingly evident in workplaces and creating situations of distrust, requiring trust repair strategies to address these differences (Tomlinson, 2025). For example, the use of self-revealing personal narratives rather than data-driven arguments has recently been explored in this context (Hagmann et al., 2024). 

Further trust research in the context of polarization is needed to better understand this growing cultural and societal trend. Relationship constructs such as LMX, trust, and the psychological contract are commonly understood to be the underlying mechanisms behind the impact of many organizational psychology constructs on important workplace outcomes (Martin et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2007). For instance, literature on the impact of various leadership styles often acknowledges the importance of mediators such as trust in impacting performance and well-being (Legood et al., 2021; Kelloway et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2010). Furthermore, we know that culture influences the relationship between leadership and important outcomes (Den Hartog & De Hoogh, 2024). We also know that human resource management practices influence employee trust, but that a greater understanding of the impact of societal cultural dimensions is needed (Kong et al., 2026). A focus on the role of trust in workplace relationships would deepen our understanding of these processes and the dynamics of workplace relationships more generally. Moreover, trust research is often more influenced by the management field than work and organizational psychology and to some extent this has influenced a focus on more performance and behavioural related outcomes as opposed to individual well-being as well as the depth of trust theorising around the role of social norms across contexts.

Through this group meeting, we aim to advance the state of the art in developing psychological theory regarding individual, relational, and contextual differences in trust expectations and norms. This SGM seeks to facilitate a cross-disciplinary dialogue that sheds light on how cultural, sectoral and contextual norms can influence how trust is shaped, interpreted, and enacted across different organizational contexts. We therefore encourage submissions from various disciplinary fields to inform a psychological perspective on trust. Studies may describe any industry, country or geographical region. Conceptual papers and rigorous empirical (quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods) papers are welcome.

The following are examples of questions our SGM invites participants to explore. These questions serve as examples and are not intended to be exhaustive.
● How do norms for signalling trustworthiness differ across group, organizational and cultural contexts?
● How do individuals and groups develop and communicate norms for trusting?
● What role do norms play in informing trust or distrust in individuals and organizations?
● How do norms influence the importance of different cues for trusting?
● How do norms for signalling trustworthiness differ across group, organizational and cultural contexts?
● What is the interplay between trust norms and expectation thresholds across relational contexts?
● How do relational norms influence our experience of vulnerability across contexts? How does the emergence of vulnerability change trust processes and outcomes?
● How can organizations and their leaders establish group norms that support trust and disrupt distrust in their organizations?

● How does the development of trust norms influence societal polarization and
distrust?
● How can theory on trust norms and cultural expectations play a role in practitioner decision making and policy development?
 

We also aim to encourage trust researchers to be more active in the work and organizational psychology community, engage with stakeholders to understand salient trust concerns for those in health and social care, in trade unions, and workplaces and in policy development, develop evidence-based tools and r sources on this topic for the EAWOP impact incubator, and advance more high quality and applied trust research and dissemination at EAWOP
meetings.

Organising Committee:

Colette Real Lisa van der Werff Ros Searle Deanne Den Hartog

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Deanne den Hartog (University of Amsterdam) Prof. Tony Kong (University of Colorado Boulder) Prof. Rosalind Searle (University of Glasgow)

The local organising team (Colette Real, Paulene Yaranon, Lisa van der Werff) would like to thank European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology and DCU Business School, DCU Institute for Business and Society for their support in hosting this event. 

Abstract submissions

Up to 2,000 words including references Email to colette.real@dcu.ie

Deadline

June 15th 2026  Acceptance decisions will be communicated by June 30th.

The full call for papers is available here.