The Relationships Among Adult Attachment, General Self-Disclosure, and Perceived Organizational Trust

Organizations often take trust for granted or ignore it, although trust is important for organizational learning and performance. Organizations must continuously learn if they are to survive, and trust facilitates individual and organizational learning. However, many authors either mention the importance of trust, or assume trust is present, and then discuss other topics as if little can be done to better understand the antecedents of trust or to improve trust in an organization. In particular, prior to this study, researchers had not explored the influence of adult attachment and disclosiveness on organizational trust. Human resources development professionals can play a vital role by helping leaders in their organizations attain strategic goals, however, no research study done previously has focused on how trust in an organization is influenced by adult attachment and disclosiveness. There is a need to better understand organizational trust because in today's global economy, an organization's ability to survive may depend in part on individual and organizational learning facilitated by trust. This study focused on a main research question "What portion of the variance in employees' perceptions of organizational trust do employees' adult attachment and disclosiveness explain?" During this research, a revised instrument for measuring organizational trust was developed. The findings of this study showed that disclosiveness did not have a statistically significant influence on organizational trust. In contrast, fearful attachment, in particular was shown to have a modest, statistically significant, and negative influence on organizational trust.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Human Development

Department dc:contributor.department

Human Development

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Adams, Samuel Hamilton

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Wiswell, Albert W.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Kurstedt, Harold A. Jr.
• Belli, Gabriella M.
• Rosen, Karen H.
• Croswell, Clyde

• Self-Disclosure
• Organizational Trust
• Adult Attachment

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-03252004-150617

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/26499