College of Business

This paper refines and extends ideas about control-trust dynamics in two ways. First, we describe a theory of managerial action that outlines how managers integrate their efforts to apply controls and demonstrate their trustworthiness. We observe that managers attempt to promote superior-subordinate cooperation by linking their applications of output controls with demonstrations of their reliability, process controls with demonstrations of their competence, and social controls with demonstrations of their benevolence. Second, we demonstrate how the ways that managers combine efforts to apply controls and demonstrate their trustworthiness differentially influence the trust that subordinates have in their managers and the extent to which subordinates perceive they are controlled by them. When managers couple their efforts to apply output or social controls with efforts to demonstrate their reliability and benevolence respectively, subordinates perceive that their managers are motivated by trustworthy intentions and not by desires to control them. However, when managers couple their efforts to apply process controls with efforts to demonstrate their competence, subordinates’ perceive that their managers are motivated by a desire to control them, and not by trustworthy intentions. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this perspective advances research on organizational control, organizational trust, and trust-control relationships.