Social exchange model of subordinate’s trust in supervisors’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management

1 This study demonstrates how the subordinate’s defensiveness predicts perception of managerial behaviors, which in turn leads to trust in supervisors. From a social information processing perspective, defensiveness, the affective reaction to uncertainty and vulnerability, serves as the “frame ” subordinates use to decode and evaluate managerial behaviors. Trust in supervisors is anchored in this perception. A two-group analysis in Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used to test this model by a Chinese and a US sample