Media reports and business guidebooks often appear to assume a high degree of skepticism toward other people as either an inherent characteristic of successful managers or a side effect of becoming a manager (Beer, 2004; Bhote, 2002; Gulati, 2014; Meck, 2014). Co-founder of Intel Andrew Grove (1996), for instance, authored the strikingly titled book Only the Paranoid Survive. The commonplace phrase lonely at the top also implies that managers lack colleagues who they can trust and who are honest with them (Douglas, 2012). In line with this media coverage, we found in a short online survey of 87 German professionals that 63.2% of respondents considered managers generally distrusting of others, whereas only 36.8% described managers as generally trusting. Using the same dichotomous question for non-managers, only 29.9% of respondents regarded non-managers as generally distrusting, and 70.1% considered non-managers generally trusting of others.1 From a historical perspective, caution against trust has already been expressed in important works from philosophers like Niccolo Machiavelli (1532/2003) and Thomas Hobbes (1651/1986). The derived term Machiavellianism, for example, implies that people in positions of power have a general propensity to distrust others (Dahling, Whitaker, & Levy, 2009). In his classic book Exchange and Power in Social Life, Peter Blau (1964/2008) also remarked that distrust in economic relations is expected in our society. Accordingly, it is discussed whether today’s business schools are training the next generation of managers to distrust others due to the way they teach the basic assumptions of economics such as rationality and self-interest (Arrunada ~ & V
azquez, 2013). It has also been put forth that our society and its organizations could function without trust because distrust motivates people to establish systems that are based on mechanisms other than trust (Cook, Hardin, & Levi, 2005).

This keynote of distrust not only stands in marked contrast to the old ideal of the honorable merchant who is both trusting and trustworthy and who does business based on good faith (Cox, 1958; Frevert, 2013). It also contradicts well established findings from sociological, economic, and organizational research showing that trust is fundamental in various social contexts such as negotiation,organizational change, entrepreneurship, organizational alliances, leadership, and team processes (Caliendo, Fossen, & Kritikos, 2012; Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012). Further research has shown that trust reduces transaction costs and thereby stimulates economic success (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2002). Finally, no less than Adam Smith (1776/2000) emphasized the role of trust as a foundation for the functioning of our market system in general (Evensky, 2011)

At the micro level, prior organizational research has emphasized both the importance of trust in managers and trust of managers. The majority of publications deal with trust in managers or leaders (Burke, Sims, Lazzara, & Salas, 2007; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Grover, Hasel, Manville, & Serrano-Archimi, 2014; Mayer & Davis, 1999) and have demonstrated, for instance, that employees’ trust in managers is associated with job satisfaction, organizational commitment, intention to stay, and job performance (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002; Nienaber, Romeike, Searle, & Schewe, 2015a). However, empirical research on trust of managers or leaders is relatively scarce, as has been noted previously (Brower, Lester, Korsgaard, & Dineen, 2009; Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012; Nienaber et al., 2015a). In this context, Brower et al. (2009) have shown that managers’ trust is positively related to their employees’ organizational citizenship behavior and negatively related to their employees’ intentions to quit. Further researchers have noted that trust in others is associated with behaviors that are particularly decisive for managers, for example delegating tasks (Jehn & Mannix, 2001), handling complexity (Luhmann, 1968/2014), encouraging others to achieve their potential (McGregor, 1960/1987), forming new relationships, or giving former relationships a second chance (Rotter, 1980). Moreover, trust in others is also related to less monitoring and surveillance (McGregor, 1960/1987). Given these advantages of managerial trust for managers themselves (e.g., saving time and motivating employees by delegating tasks without constant monitoring), their employees (e.g., feeling encouraged and wanting to stay), and thus their organizations, it would be both surprising and alarming if managers would be particularly distrusting