Do your employees (collectively) trust you? The importance of trust climate beyond individual trust

•Neither theory nor empirical study in the trust literature has explored the impacts of trust climate on individual outcomes.•We found that both individual-level trust in management and unit-level trust climate related to job-related outcomes.•Trust climate was found to moderate the relationships between individual-level trust and job-related outcomes.•This underscored the theoretical importance of considering the cross-level impact of trust climate.•This also suggested that organizations should focus on creating a positive trust climate beyond fostering individual-level trusting relationships.

Current conceptualizations of trust focus largely on the individual level of analysis; neither theory nor empirical study has explored group-level trust on individual-level outcomes. Using a multilevel framework, we hypothesized that both individual-level trust in management and unit-level trust climate would be positively associated with employee job satisfaction, affective commitment, job security, service motivation, and work engagement, and negatively associated with turnover intentions and burnout. Moreover, trust climate would moderate the relationships between individual-level trust and those job-related outcomes. Data collected from 468 faculty members nested in 41 departments at a large university supported our hypotheses. Multilevel analyses revealed that trust climate explained variance in employee outcomes beyond that accounted for by individual trust, and the positive relationship between individual trust and job security was stronger and the negative relationship between trust and burnout was weaker in departments with higher trust climate. These results underscore the theoretical importance of considering the cross-level influence of trust climate and suggest that organizations should focus on creating a positive climate promoting trust beyond fostering individual trust.