Impacts of organizational leadership and culture on organizational trust: Role of job cadre

Abstract

This study sampled 554 (362 junior cadre and 192 middle cadre) employees with a view to investigating the extent to which their work performance orientations and their ratings of the quality of their immediate superiors may dictate the amount of cognitive and affective trusts they hold for their superiors – employee cadre, was employed as a control variable. Data analysis via two separate 2X2X2 ANOVA revealed significant main influences of leadership quality and performance orientation on both affective and cognitive trusts such that employees who perceived high leadership qualities in their superiors reported higher affective and cognitive trusts than employees who saw their superiors as possessing low leadership qualities. Likewise, employees who rated their organization as being high in performance orientation trusted their superiors more than employees who rated their organization as being low in performance orientation. The interaction between leadership quality and employee cadre was significant on affective trust but not on cognitive trust. Among employees who rated the quality of their superiors as high, the junior ones reported a higher affective trust than their middle cadre counterparts. Post hoc further shows that affective trust for superiors was higher among both junior and middle cadre employees who rated their superior‘s leadership quality as high than for the junior and middle cadre employees who found their superiors to be low in leadership quality. Nevertheless, affective trust is higher for junior employees compared to middle cadre employees when employees judged their superiors‘ leadership quality as being high. But where superiors are judged as possessing low leadership quality, middle cadre employees report a higher affective trust compared to junior employees. The findings were discussed in the light of reviewed empirical and theoretical literatures with the implications of the study for organizational growth strongly highlighted.