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  5. Being Trusted: How Team Generational Age Diversity Promotes and Undermines Trust in Cross-Boundary Relationships

Being Trusted: How Team Generational Age Diversity Promotes and Undermines Trust in Cross-Boundary Relationships

File(s)
Williiams9_Being_trusted.pdf (411.85 KB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/75305
Collections
ILR Articles and Chapters
Faculty Publications - Organizational Behavior
Author
Williams, Michele
Abstract

We examine how demographic context influences the trust that boundary spanners experience in their dyadic relationships with clients. Because of the salience of age as a demographic characteristic as well as the increasing prevalence of age diversity and intergenerational conflict in the workplace, we focus on team age diversity as a demographic social context that affects trust between boundary spanners and their clients. Using social categorization theory and theories of social capital, we develop and test our contextual argument that a boundary spanner’s experience of being trusted is influenced by the social categorization processes that occur in dyadic interactions with a specific client and simultaneously, by similar social categorization processes that influence the degree to which the client team as a whole serves as a cooperative resource for demographically similar versus dissimilar boundary spanner-client dyads. Using a sample of 167 senior boundary spanners from the consulting industry, we find that generational diversity among client team members from a client organization undermines the perception of being trusted within homogeneous boundary spanner-client dyads while it enhances the perception of being trusted within heterogeneous dyads. The perception of being trusted is an important aspect of cross-boundary relationships because it influences coordination and the costs associated with coordination.

Date Issued
2015-01-01
Keywords
being trusted
•
boundary spanners
•
social categorization
•
age diversity
•
age heterogeneity
•
age composition
Related DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2045
Rights
Required Publisher Statement: © Wiley. Final version published as: Williams, M. (2015). Being trusted: How team generational age diversity promotes and undermines trust in cross-boundary relationships. Journal of Organizational Behavior. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1002/job.2045Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Type
article

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