The effectiveness of a group, an organization, a community, or a society requires its members’ coordinated actions. Yet people’s interests and goals oftentimes are misaligned, causing social conflict (Deutsch, 1949). In order to coordinate their actions with others, individuals use certain heuristics known as organizing principles, such as market, hierarchy, and clan (Ouchi, 1980), to process information and enact appropriate behaviors. Trust, as another important organizing principle (McEvily, Perrone, & Zaheer, 2003), refers to one’s willingness to accept vulnerability based on positive expectations regarding others’ intentions or behaviors (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998). It economizes on one’s cognitive resources (Uzzi, 1997), structures one’s mental representations of the environment, and mobilizes one’s cooperation with others (McEvily et al., 2003).

Trust has been conceptualized as a form of social capital (Putnam, 1993) that can be utilized and transformed into other forms of capital such as economic (Granovetter, 2005) and intellectual capital (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998), and has received growing attention in various disciplines.1 Trust can be classified into particularized (thick or specific) trust and generalized (thin or diffuse) trust; the former refers to one’s trust in specific people based on one’s familiarity and similarity with those people, whereas the latter refers to trust in most strangers based on their morality, reputation, and characteristics (Freitag & Traunmu¨ller, 2009; Glanville & Paxton, 2007; Kong, 2013a). Although particularized trust can facilitate cooperative behaviors and task performance and reduce deviant behaviors within specific relationships (see Colquitt, Scott, & LePine, 2007; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Kong, Dirks, & Ferrin, 2014 for meta-analytic results), ‘‘[i]n modern society, which involves daily interaction with strangers, general[ized] trust is thought to be more important than particular[ized] trust’’ (Delhey, Newton, & Welzel, 2011, p. 786). Realo, Allik, and Greenfield (2008) also noted that ‘‘[d]evelopment and modernization require that the network of trust is extended to others outside of the traditional circle of family, neighborhood, and village’’ (p. 450). Yet management research has largely focused on particularized trust, neglecting generalized trust. The current research focuses on generalized trust, thus advancing this line of inquiry.

Generalized trust bestows a range of benefits atthe macro level; it contributes to better quality of government, economic growth, enhanced subjective well-being, social cohesion, civic engagement, and so forth (see Dinesen, 2012; Kong, 2013a). At the micro level, generalized trust, also known as trust propensity or ‘‘the general willingness to trust others’’ (Mayer et al., 1995, p. 715), fosters fairness perception (Bianchi & Brockner, 2012), relationshipspecific trust (Colquitt et al., 2007; Mayer & Davis, 1999), trust in outgroup members (Muethel & Bond, 2013), high-quality social relationships (Bernerth & Walker, 2009), and positive workattitudes and behaviors (Bianchi & Brockner, 2012; Colquitt, LePine, Zapata, & Wild, 2011). These benefits generate increasing scholarly interest in identifying the determinants of generalized trust, particularly across cultures (Ferrin & Gillespie, 2010).