Why should I trust you? Predictors of interpersonal trust in a knowledge transfer context

Prior research has demonstrated that interpersonal trust is critical to knowledge transfer in organizational settings. Yet there has been only limited systematic empirical work examining factors that promote a knowledge seekers trust in a knowledge source. We propose three categories of variables that affect interpersonal trust in this context: attributes of the relationship between the knowledge seeker and source; attributes of the knowledge source; and attributes of the knowledge seeker. We analyzed these multilevel data simultaneously with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) using survey data from three companies in different industries and countries. We found that (1) variables in all three categories were statistically significant, with the biggest effect coming from more malleable features such as the cognitive dimension of social capital (i.e., shared vision and shared language), and little or no effect from more stable and visible features such as formal structure and demographic similarity; (2) benevolence-based trust was easier to predict than competence-based trust, both in terms of the number of significant predictors and the variance accounted for; and (3) knowledge seekers reliance on knowledge