Focusing the mediating role of institutional trust: How does interpersonal trust promote organizational commitment?

• We propose and compare two conceptually different models of the relations between different trust types and organizational commitment.
• The main-effect model suggests that interpersonal trust and institutional trust directly and independently affect organizational commitment.
• The mediation-effect model assumes that interpersonal trust influences institutional trust, which in turn affects organizational commitment.
• Using survey data of Korean government officials, results of structural equation modeling (SEM) show the mediation-effect model is more plausible.
• Findings from the Korean sample are successfully replicated in a sample of blue-collar workers gathered in the United Kingdom in 1973.

Numerous organization scholars point out that trust is crucial for well-functioning organizations. However, trust in organizational settings could differ according to the objects of trust. This study compares two conceptually different models: main-effect model and mediation-effect model. The main-effect model assumes that both interpersonal trust and institutional trust promote organizational commitment independently, but the mediation-effect model assumes that institutional trust is cultivated by interpersonal trust and increases organizational commitment. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) show that the mediation-effect model fits better than the main-effect model and that the structural coefficients of the mediation-effect model are neatly interpreted by social scientific studies of trust. This study's findings have two important implications: First, there seems to be sequential order between different types of trust in organizational settings. Second, interpersonal trust promotes organizational commitment only if it facilitates institutional trust, providing an explanation for the inconsistent findings of previous studies.