Knowledge and Discourse Matters

12TRUST AS AN ARTIFACT OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING

12.1 THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST

The importance of trust in knowledge sharing (KS) and its status as the lubricant of an organization’s operations are two good reasons to justify trust as a phenomenon of interest. Without trust, organizations would simply not be able to function. We can all easily imagine the chaos that would ensue if everyone in work suddenly decided that no one and no thing could be trusted. Fortunately, we are not only a highly collaborative species, an essential ingredient to human progress and development as Thomas Suddendorf notes, but we are also quite trusting.

Yet ironically and as has been seen time after time with other phenomena of interest, the definition of trust is a troubling concern. The scholar Jonathan Clifton is one of the few in the discourse world who has investigated “trust” in the workplace: pointing to the substantial body of conventional research on trust in organizational settings, much of which wrestles with the question of definition, he argues that it is futile to attempt to pin words onto what is essentially a human accomplishment in social interaction. According to this interpretation, trust takes its meaning from the context in which it is embedded or locally situated. Recall F. David Schoorman and colleagues’ model that locates trust in relationships as a measure of willingness to be vulnerable, defining trust as acceptable risk contingent on perception of ability, integrity, and benevolence. ...