Trust, conflict and cooperative behaviour. Considering reciprocity within organizations
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480610682262 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| Pages | 508-518 |
| Author | Karin Sanders,Birgit Schyns |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Trust, conflict and cooperative
behaviour
Considering reciprocity within organizations
Karin Sanders and Birgit Schyns
University of Twente, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose – In this introduction of the special issue “Trust, conflict and cooperative behaviour” the
focus of the special issue is introduced: because al lot of attitudinal and behavioural employees’
outcomes are based on reciprocity, they should be examined as a characteristic of relationships instead
of a characteristic of employees.
Design/methodology approach – On a theoretical level reciprocity within organizations is
considered by means of the social embeddedness approach and by means of leader member exchange.
Findings – Although reciprocity in relationships is well recognised in the academic literature
seemingly little empirical work has been conducted on reciprocity in manager-subordinate and
subordinate-subordinate relationships.
Originality/value – In this special issue, we try to fill in this gap and focus on the reciprocity within
relationships to explain trust, conflict and cooperative behaviour within organisations.
Keywords Employee behaviour, Employee attitudes,Employee involvement, Industrial relations
Paper type General review
1. Introduction
Recent developments inside and outside organisations have sparked new research
questions about the behaviour of managers and employees within modern work
organisations. It has been claimed that less predictable outlet markets, and the
micro-electronic revolution (Taplin, 1995) have brought about a change from
hierarchical control by means of authority chains to more horizontal organisation al
structures (Piore, 2002). These organisational changes come under various headings –
the flexible workplace, the socio-technical revolution, and the post-Fordist firm and
their consequences for the workplace are just as variously denoted with phrases like
employability, empowerment and “every worker a knowledge worker”.
To react on changes of a dynamic outlet market responsibility for attaining
production goals are transferred from supervisors to teams, such as
management-teams, project groups or self-managing teams (Cohen and Bailey, 1997;
Goodman, 1986). Within these teams, employees enjoy a considerable amount of
autonomy, perform challenging tasks and experience alignment between personal and
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
Karin Sanders worked on this article during a visit at the University of New South Wales (School
of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour), in Sydney, Australia. Most of the papers
included in this special issue of Personnel Review were presented at the International Conference
Innovating HRM? – 7 and 8 November 2003 at the University of Twente, The Netherlands.
The authors want to thank Tom Redman for his valuable comments on an earlier version of
the introduction of this special issue. Authors thank the reviewers of the different articles for
their valuable comments on earlier versions of the articles.
PR
35,5
508
Personnel Review
Vol. 35 No. 5, 2006
pp. 508-518
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480610682262
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