Browsing by Subject "Trust"
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Item Alliance re-formation: uncertainty, inexperience, complexity and termination experience in the thoroughbred horse industry, 2005-2010(2013-02) Fudge, Darcy KathrynMy dissertation investigates the effects of alliance termination conditions on alliance re-formation by the former partners. While the existing literature assumes that an alliance forms after termination in the same way as it formed initially, I treat termination as the beginning of a process rather than as an independent event. I argue that alliance re-formation is distinct from alliance formation due to the attributions the former partners develop concerning their prior termination. Alliance terminations are often ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations. I identify typical alliance termination antecedents, such as primary uncertainty, task inexperience and complexity, as important conditions under which the termination occurs that counter intuitively facilitate alliance re-formation. These factors frame the termination as a positive attribution, based upon incidents which are exogenous, uncontrollable and rare. Further, I find greater alliance termination experience enhances alliance re-formation, allowing firms to adjust expectations from alliance terminations. I test these ideas on a longitudinal sample of 2,256 terminated alliances that include alliance re-formations in the Thoroughbred horse industry, where alliance partners breed and co-own horses to sell at auction. Using this unique data set to account for the fit and the performance of the terminated alliances, I find support for my hypotheses for primary uncertainty and termination experience. My dissertation makes a number of important theoretical contributions by showing that alliance re-formation has a set of antecedents distinct from factors informing initial formation, and that termination experience is an important antecedent to the trust and the re-creation of trust. These findings have valuable practical implications for strategic management and organizational practitioners.Item Can Power Change Consumers? Investigating Consumer Empowerment through Social Media and Their Complaining Behavioral Intentions(2016-08) Xu, HaoIn recent years, social media has become an important source of power for consumers, helping them put forward their opinions of the companies’ products and services and demand improvements. As contemporary consumers have been granted increasing power over brands via social media, their complaining behaviors are playing an important role in the daily business practices, which also offers new research opportunities for the study of consumer behaviors. Heeding the limited research on the underlying mechanism of consumer complaining behavioral intentions and social media empowerment, this experimental study examined the relationships between two dimensions of psychological empowerment (interactional and intrapersonal empowerment) and consumers’ complaining behavioral intentions in the social media context. At the same time, the roles of consumers’ prior trust and commitment with the brands, as well as their feeling of dissatisfaction were also investigated in this study. This study revealed two effects of psychological empowerment, including increasing consumers’ intention to perform certain complaining behaviors, as well as reinforcing the correspondence between their predisposition and behaviors. In addition, consumers’ prior trust and commitment with brands were found to serve as a buffer and mitigate consumers’ intention to take negative complaining behaviors. Both theoretical and practical implications in terms of the dynamics of power-induced dissatisfaction responses and other related factors were discussed.Item Computational Trust at Various Granularities in Social Networks(2015-12) Roy, AtanuTrust has been a ubiquitous phenomenon in human lives. The phenomenon of trust has been studied at various granularities over the centuries by various researchers encompassing all disciplines of academia. Historically, it has been witnessed that the primary mode of studying trust has been surveying subjects and documenting the results. But the burgeoning electronic social media have provided us with the unique opportunity of studying trust under a new perspective, which is known as computational trust. Computational trust is defined as the generation of trust between two human actors mediated through computers. This is an active area of research due to the proliferation of various socially rich datasets over the past decade. This includes massively multi-player online games (MMOs), online social networks and various web services, allowing actors to trust each other in an online virtual setting. The first part of this thesis investigates various aspects affecting dyadic (or interpersonal) trust, i.e., trust between two actors. This includes formation, reciprocation and revocation of trust. Taking into account various nuances of dyadic trust, this thesis predicts the occurrence of these three phenomena in the datasets. Instead of looking at these phenomena by itself, this thesis looks at this phenomena in conjunction with social relations for better predictive modeling. One of the major requirements in trust applications is identifying the trustworthy actors in the social networks which will be the subject of investigation for the second part of this dissertation. An important factor in the prediction of trust is an actor's inherent ability to trust others and the perception of the actor in the network. This thesis proposes a pair of complementary measures that can be used to measure trust scores of actors in a social network using involvement of social networks. Based on the proposed measures, an iterative matrix convergence algorithm is developed that calculates the trustingness and the trustworthiness of each actor in the network. Trustingness of an actor is defined as the propensity of an actor to trust his neighbors in the network. Trustworthiness, on the other hand, is defined as the willingness of the network to trust an individual actor. The algorithm runs in O(k * |E|) time where k denotes the number of iterations and |E| denotes the number of edges in the network. This thesis also shows that the algorithm converges to a finite value very quickly. Lastly, this thesis introduces the concept of "vulnerable paths" and identifies those paths in a social network. Based on the hypothesis that these vulnerable paths are imperative for influence flow, a new algorithm proposed in this thesis, exploits these paths for better and more targeted viral marketing using trust scores. It is shown that there is an improvement as high as 9% in identifying these paths using the proposed algorithm than state of the art trust scoring algorithms. This thesis makes the following contributions. It studies the generative mechanisms of trust not in isolation, but in conjunction with the social processes(relations) around trust. Whereas earlier studies were interested in looking at the cross-sectional view of trust, this study investigates the longitudinal view of trust. Instead of looking only at the dynamics of initiation of interpersonal trust, this study looks at the various other dynamics such as reciprocation and revocation of interpersonal trust. This study also exploits the negative feedback property in trust to propose computationally stable pair of global trust measures, which can be used to measure the propensity of actors to trust and be trusted in a network. Finally, this pair of scores is leveraged to be used in various applications such as viral marketing, identification of "vulnerable paths" and inoculation of a network from rumor spread.Item Computational trust in Multiplayer Online Games.(2012-04) Ahmad, Muhammad AurangzebTrust is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human societies. Computational trust refers to the mediation of trust via a computational infrastructure. It has been studied in a variety of contexts e.g., peer-to-peer systems, multi-agent systems, recommendation systems etc. While this is an active area of research, the types of questions that have been explored in this field has been limited mainly because of limitations in the types of datasets which are available to researchers. In this thesis questions related to trust in complex social environments represented by Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are explored. The main emphasis is that trust is a multi-level phenomenon both in terms of how it operates at multiple levels of network granularities and how trust relates to other social phenomenon like homophily, expertise, mentoring, clandestine behaviors etc. Social contexts and social environments affect not just the qualitative aspects of trust but this phenomenon is also manifested with respect to the network and structural signatures of trust network. Additionally trust is also explored in the context of predictive tasks: Previously described prediction tasks like link prediction are studied in the context of trust within the context of the link prediction family of problems: Link formation, link breakage, change in links etc. Additionally we define and explore new trust-related prediction problems i.e., trust propensity prediction, trust prediction across networks which can be generalized to the inter-network link prediction problem and success prediction based on using network measures of a person's social capital as a proxy.Item The Currency of Public Trust: Ways the nonprofit sector builds trust among constituents.(2023) Rodel Sorum, KristinaIn the nonprofit sector, building trust among constituents is of paramount importance to an organization's effectiveness. This paper explores how organizational leadership prioritize constituents and establish a trusting reciprocal relationship with them. Through interviews with leadership figures at nine arts nonprofits in Minneapolis and Saint Paul Minnesota, this paper provides real examples in trust building, repair after a breach in trust, and provides recommendations for best practices.Item An Epistemology of Solidarity: Coalition in the Face of Ignorance(2018-11) Bowman, MelaniePrivileged ignorance about the structures of domination consists not merely in the absence of knowledge, but in the positive production of false information, of encouragement to look away and to actively not-know. I argue that for a person subject to privileged ignorance, attempting to remedy this ignorance by seeking more knowledge brings its own challenges: We have good reason to think that the cognitive distortions that produce privileged ignorance continue to affect a person’s knowledge production even when she becomes aware that they exist. Instead, the epistemically and morally responsible behavior for people privileged with respect to a system of oppression is to interrogate the purpose and provenance of their ignorance and to practice critical trust in the experts (i.e., those who are oppressed under that system). Learning to trust wisely is good for liberatory politics because it demands that we cultivate relationships of trustworthiness. It is also better for knowledge production than pursuing epistemic autonomy, which either vastly constricts what we can know or causes us to overestimate our epistemic abilities in ways that reinforce the cognitive distortions of privilege. Evaluating what we think we know in terms of narrative significance—Whose story does this advance? Which characters are undeveloped? What future narratives does this enable, and which does it foreclose?— in addition to truth-value can offer a solution to paralyzing skepticism and can spur coalitional political action in the face of uncertainty.Item Exploring the nomological net of trust in leadership: an empirical examination of antecedents, moderators, and outcomes(2012-12) Rasch, Rena LenoreTo fully understand human interactions in the workplace, we must understand the role trust plays. My dissertation is a general investigation of trust between subordinates and leaders within an organizational context. Using a diverse sample of US employees, I examined the relative importance of three key trust determinants: leader benevolence, competence, and integrity. I also examined the role trait trust plays in the trust nomological net. I examined previously posited, yet untested, moderators of the trustworthiness-trust relationship. Lastly, I tested the contextual effects of risk and formal controls on the relationship between employees' trust in leadership and their turnover intentions. I found an individual's propensity to trust seems to affect trust in leadership through perceptions of leader trustworthiness. Leaders can inspire trust by being capable, kind, and honest. Leader integrity is the most important direct determinant of trust in leadership. Despite theoretical arguments, relationship length and job complexity have no bearing on the importance of the direct determinants of trust in leadership. A manager may use trust to influence his/her staff, who are more willing to assume risk on their manager's behalf. Trust may act as a substitute for costly and rigid formal control mechanisms, like legal contracts. Despite theoretical arguments, situational risk in the form of organizational change, whether perceived or actual, does not magnify the importance of trust in leadership to turnover intentions. Still, trust in leadership is important to predicting turnover intentions, even beyond job satisfaction and organizational commitment.Item The foundations of community capacity: an exploration of the role of fairness, trust and legitimacy in sustainable watershed management(2014-11) Sames, AmandaWater resource managers and policymakers are increasingly turning to a watershed approach using hydrologic rather than political boundaries to address water resource problems. However, transboundary, interjurisdictional water resource management can be especially challenging for local government officials and citizens. This thesis examines community capacity for sustainable watershed management within two southeastern Minnesota mixed land use and multi-jurisdictional watersheds. Specific objectives were to describe and compare conditions and capacities that promote or constrain sustainable watershed management from the perspective of water resource professionals, government officials and active community members. Data were gathered though 49 key informant interviews conducted with resource professionals, community decision makers and active residents in 2011and 2012 and analyzed using grounded theory and comparative analysis. Findings indicate the importance of fairness, trust and legitimacy in relation to community capacity for sustainable watershed management. The emergence of fairness, trust and legitimacy in this study indicate a new aspect of community capacity: foundational conditions. As foundational conditions, they allow previously identified actionable capacities to be leveraged in response to community needs, in this case, sustainable watershed management. Implications for resource managers are discussed.Item In God Do We Trust? an analysis of trust reformation in a Catholic Parish(2013-12) Reandeau, Dawna CarlingIn my research, I examined two avenues of trust; trust in the organization and trust in God. In an effort to revitalize a Catholic parish, a model of total stewardship was introduced. The purpose was to bring parishioners to an awareness of God's generosity. This reformation consolidated financial collection efforts exclusively to the Sunday offering, including financial support for the parochial school which had previously collected tuition payments. I analyzed the response of the school parents from surveys with respect to the changes in tuition charging and the high level of trust extended to them. Network analysis was used to gauge aspects of organizational trust. The survey asked parents about whom they get information about parish matters. The process of the trust negotiation from the perspective of the administration was captured with interviews of a few key parish administrators. One of the key findings was that as ministry participation increased; trust in the school administration decreased. Since most ministries were parish based, information in parish ministries reinforced and circulated negative information about the school. The second aspect of the research was trust in God. I hypothesized that a stronger religious belief or trust in God would create a stronger behavioral response and school parents would more likely embrace the stewardship model. Questions on the survey regarding four religious belief and four religious behaviors combined together to create a scale to measure religiosity or trust in God. I worked under the assumption that a deep faith transforms our behavior, or as it is said in Roman Catholic tradition, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi, and this would translate to greater stewardship commitment. The indicators used to measure religiosity showed some strong levels of commitment and trust in God. This trust in God did not directly show a correspondence of trust in either the school or parish administration. Only when the parents had a trust in the parish administration did their trust in God manifest in greater giving.Item The Role of Trust in Creating Sustainable Change through Interorganizational Collaborations in Health Care Education(2015-07) DeVries, ReneeThe sectors of higher education and health care are experiencing increased calls for accountability regarding their outcomes and affordability. The elevated scrutiny and superimposed fiscal constraints create an opportunity for growth and redesign. Partnerships and collaborations have emerged as one approach to addressing challenges in both arenas. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of trust on the success of collaborations between institutions of higher education in the health care arena. A multiple case-study design is used to examine three partnerships created through the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) CAM Practitioner Research Education Project Grant Partnership (R25). The selected partnerships include three colleges of chiropractic, each paired with a university with very high research activity. The historical tension between chiropractic and traditional medicine, largely due to philosophically different approaches to health care, make the study of trust especially intriguing. The mixed-methods study design includes qualitative data collection through interviews of 11 key participants from the chiropractic and research intensive institutions from all three partnerships. Qualitative interview data are used to provide description regarding the three partnerships and to explore the impact of trust on the formation of the collaborations. Quantitative data are collected through surveys of 101 faculty and administrators from the chiropractic institutions. Additional qualitative data are also gathered through open ended survey questions. Quantitative data are used to examine the impact of trust on the perceptions of success of the collaborative efforts. The qualitative findings suggest that interpersonal trust, specifically the role of boundary spanners, plays an important role in the formation of collaborations. The most significant themes related to partnership formation are generative capacity, defined as the willingness to partner with someone based on positive experiences of a past partnership, and transferability, or the transfer of trust to an unknown person based on trust of a third party known by both individuals. With regard to the willingness of individuals to participate in the activities of the collaboration, identifying, or the degree to which individuals perceive the priorities of the project as similar to their own, emerge as the most significant theme. Disclosing, or the willingness of individuals to disclose their weaknesses, trusting that the information will not be used against them, is the second most frequent theme. The most significant themes related to interorganizational trust are: reliability; personal connection; reputation; communication; and expertise. Results of a multiple regression analysis indicate statistically significant findings for organizational trust (b = .60, t = 4.17, p < .001), interorganizational trust (b = .30, t = 2.52, p =.01), and interpersonal trust (b = .16, t = 2.74, p = .01) as explanatory factors in perceptions of project success. As health care institutions and health care delivery systems respond to the demands for improved services, better outcomes, and increased affordability, interprofessional education and collaborative practice will become the norm. Given the increased evidence for the effectiveness and cost effectiveness for chiropractic care in the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions, specifically spine pain, chiropractors should be considered as valuable contributors to integrated health care teams. As academic and health care administrators look to expand opportunities for collaboration between CAM and traditional medicine, they would be wise to consider the important role of trust on the success of these collaborations.Item Superintendent Decision-Making Process As It Impacts Primary And Ancillary Stakeholders(2020-02) Wehrkamp, KristineAbstract This study investigates how superintendents consider and/or prioritize stakeholders in their decision-making process. The review of the literature included common decision-making theories, Responsible Leadership Theory and Trust as they apply to the decision-making process for superintendents. Grounded Theory methodology was employed to construct a theory for superintendent decision making as it relates to stakeholders. Eight superintendents were interviewed and responses were recorded and then coded according to the accepted coding processes of grounded theory research. A formative theory was developed that categorizes stakeholders as either primary or ancillary stakeholders. The theory describes the placement of stakeholders as considered by superintendents in their decision-making process. Key words: Decision-making theories, Responsible Leadership Theory, trust, primary stakeholders, ancillary stakeholdersItem A translational approach to the neurobiology of persecutory ideation in schizophrenia.(2011-08) Johnson, Melissa KayThe heterogeneous symptom presentation of schizophrenia has created difficulties in understanding the disease's biological basis. As a result, researchers have adopted dimension or symptom-specific methodologies to identify the disease's etiology. Another successful research method in schizophrenia involves the translation of experimental paradigms designed to study the neurobiology of cognitive mechanisms through multiple levels of inquiry. The current manuscript described the translation of an economic decision-making paradigm into a sample of individuals with schizophrenia. Results showed that patients with schizophrenia in this sample were able to understand the paradigm and as predicted showed behavioral results similar to controls. A symptom measure of persecutory ideation showed a specific relationship to a decision-making bias that has been reliably associated with persecutory ideation in control samples. In terms of neuroimaging results, patients activated the paracingulate cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, orbital frontal cortex, insula and amygdala when deciding whether or not to trust another player. These same regions were not activated when deciding whether or not to let a coin-flip determine their winnings. Of the regions activated when deciding to trust another player, only the anterior cingulate cortex correlated with a measure of persecutory ideation. Results suggest that economic decision-making paradigms can produce fruitful results in psychiatric samples. Additionally, the findings suggest a specific relationship between the self-referential thinking associated with persecutory ideation and the anterior cingulate cortex.Item Trust in the Evaluator-Client Relationship.(2008-07) Mayer, Amy M.While many evaluation theorists agree that trust in the evaluation relationship is important, none have defined trust or studied the topic in depth. This grounded theory study provides an in-depth exploration of trust in evaluation relationships. In-person, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine evaluators and nine clients of evaluation. The interviews provided rich data that inform the topic of trust in evaluation using the words of evaluators and clients. The interviews were coded and analyzed in two stages, initial coding followed by focused coding. From this analysis, ten core concepts emerged. These core concepts include personal characteristics, ability, disposition to trust, evaluation perspective, contexts, relationships, feelings, actions, outcomes, and trust as a topic. An emergent model was developed that outlines the antecedents, processes, and consequences of trust as viewed by evaluators and clients of evaluation. The importance of trust in the evaluation relationship is discussed, and further consideration of the topic is encouraged.Item A turbulent time: government sources post-2016 presidential election(Reference Services Review, 2020) Kubas, AliciaPurpose Since the 2016 presidential election, hyper-partisanship has become a regular facet of the political landscape with Democrats and Republicans in increasing conflict. The purpose of this paper is to determine if perception of government sources related to trust and credibility has changed since the 2016 election and if the experiences and strategies of librarians who teach or consult about government information has changed in response to this environment. Design/Methodology/Approach A 24-question survey was distributed to garner qualitative and quantitative responses from librarians who teach or consult about government information in an academic environment. 122 responses were used for analysis. Findings Academic librarians are seeing more concern from patrons about disappearing online government information and wider distrust of government information broadly. Librarians also noticed that the political leanings of students colors their perspective around government sources and that librarians also need to keep their political beliefs in check. Respondents emphasized a need for more government literacy and information literacy topics when discussing evaluation of government sources. Research limitations/implications The data collection only included responses from academic librarians. Further research could include in-depth interviews and look at experiences in various library types. Originality/Value With the timeliness of this topic, there has not been an in-depth investigation into how the Trump administration has changed user trust and perception of government sources from the librarian’s point of view. This paper continues the conversation about how librarians can address the growing distrust of government information and give us insight into the effects of a turbulent political climate on government sources.Item What Does Trust Have to Do with It? The Lived Experiences Of Parents Within the IEP Process: A Phenomenological Study(2018-04) Grocke, AdreaThe purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of parents involved in the IEP process. More specifically, the study explored how parents in the IEP process experience trust in their relationship with educational professionals. The two research questions addressed in this study were: What is the lived experience of parents involved in the IEP process? and How do parents in the IEP process experience trust? Data were collected through 90-minute semi-structured individual interviews with ten parents engaged in the IEP process. Participants in the study were parents of one or more children with an IEP, from school districts within a mid-sized city in the northern Midwest. For the purposes of this study “parent” refers to the adult who assumes parental roles and responsibilities for the child and has legal guardianship. In choosing the participants, convenience sampling was applied to identify the participants (Saunders, Lewis, Thornhill, 2012). Due to the convenience sampling, the homogeneity of the participants was a limitation of this study. The phenomenon focused on was trust as parents described their experiences in the IEP process. The analysis of the parents’ stories, reveals and verifies the significance of trust within the IEP process. In addition, the data analysis included a demographic questionnaire. Three overarching themes emerged in the analysis of the parent interviews that were integral to participants’ experiencing trust within the IEP process. The three themes consistent among the parents were communication, parent-teacher partnerships, and meeting the needs of their child.