Feeling Trusted or Feeling Used? The Relationship Between Perceived Leader Trust, Reciprocation Wariness, and Proactive Behavior

PURPOSE: The prevailing literature on perceived leader trust has focused on its benefits on employees’ work behavior. However, recent researches suggest that the feeling of leader trust also brings strains and work overload. Thus, existing researches have not yielded consistent conclusions about how the “trusted” employees tend to behave after being trusted by their leaders. Integrating the trait activation theory and self-evaluation psychological states, this study develops and tests the double-edged effects of perceived leader trust on proactive behavior through the different mediating roles of employee’s psychological variables. Specifically, we argued that the perceived leader trust effect is dependent on the employee’s reciprocation wariness, which to a large extent determines employees’ response to the perceived leader trust (ie, sense of self-worth and role overload). METHODS: The study uses a systematic literature review to identify the arguments supporting the relationship between the constructs and propose model. Additionally, this study adopts the multi-source design approach and collects data in a large Housing Construction & Development Company, which comprised 372 valid samples. Besides, hierarchical regression and bootstrapping methods are also employed to test the hypotheses. RESULTS: This study reveals that employee’s reciprocation wariness is negatively moderated the relationship between perceived trust and sense of self-worth while positively moderated the relationship between perceived trust and sense of role overload. Moreover, the higher the employee’s reciprocation wariness, the more negative the influence of perceived trust will be on the employee’s proactive behavior via the sense of role overload; on the contrary, the lower the employee’s reciprocation wariness, the more positive the influence of perceived trust will be on the employee’s proactive behavior via the sense of self-worth. CONCLUSION: This study examines the double-edged sword influence of perceived leader trust on employee behavior. It found that perceived leader trust will affect proactive behavior through employees’ subjective evaluation of the leader’s trust. Moreover, employee’s reciprocation wariness plays a moderating role in this relationship. In a word, this paper deeply analyzes the mechanism and boundary conditions of perceived leader trust influencing employees’ psychological state and behavior, contributing to organizational trust and workplace proactive behavior research.