Recent Work

Active Trust Building:

Williams, M. 2007 “Building genuine trust through interpersonal emotion management: A threat regulation model of trust and cooperation across boundaries.” Academy of Management Review, 32(2), 595-621.
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I introduce the construct of threat regulation as an agentic interpersonal process for building and maintaining trust. I examine threat regulation as a specific dimension of interpersonal emotion management that fosters trust and effective cooperation by allowing individuals to understand and mitigate the harm that their counterparts associate with cooperating--in particular, harm from opportunism, identity damage, and neglect of their interests. To explicate the microprocesses of threat regulation, I draw on social cognitive theory, symbolic interactionism, and the psychology of emotion regulation.

Williams, M. “Threat-reducing behavior: Interpersonal emotion work, trust and performance in a knowledge-intense economy.” 2008 Annual American Sociological Association Meetings, Boston, MA

This article investigates threat-reducing behavior as a specific type of emotion management that fosters trust. Threat-reducing behavior builds trust by mitigating counterparts’ fears about potential harm and by generating feelings of calm. Using data from three sources—senior-level consultants from a top international consulting firm, their bosses, and their clients—we provide evidence that boundary spanners’ perceptions of their own threat-reducing behavior are positively related to their counterparts’ calm feelings and trust in them. However, we show that threat-reducing behavior has a curvilinear effect on collaborative performance, which suggests that moderate levels of threat-reducing behavior are most beneficial.

Williams, M. (with Xia Ling) “Seeing through others' eyes: Appraisal-related perspective taking, trustworthiness, and performance.” 2008 Annual American Sociological Association Meetings, Boston, MA
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Benevolence is a central component of trustworthiness. It facilitates cooperation, knowledge sharing, and trust building. However, the proactive, cognitive processes that individuals use to establish their benevolence have largely been ignored. In this paper, we examine the impact of knowledge workers’ perspective taking on outside assessments of their benevolence and performance. We argue that the process of attending to how others view events from their perspective supports benevolence. Engaging in the process of perspective taking motivates people to act with concern and enables them to understand what others view as harmful versus beneficial. Using a matched sample of 147 knowledge workers and 147 of their supervising managers, we find a positive relationship between knowledge workers’ perspective taking and their managers’ perceptions of the benevolence and performance of those knowledge workers. We integrate literature from psychology, micro-sociology, and communications to elucidate the links among perspective taking, benevolence and performance.

The Social Context of Trust:

Williams, M. “To be or not to be trusted: The influence of team demographic dissimilarity on dyadic trust across boundaries.” 2008 Annual Academy of Management Meetings, Anaheim, CA
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Working title: “Trust Across Boundaries: Can a Team’s Demographic Heterogeneity Foster Dyadic Trust?”

In this article, we examine how social context influences the trust that organizational boundary spanners experience in their dyadic relationships with counterparts. We argue that the demographic composition of a boundary spanners’ full team of counterparts forms a context that differentially influences dyadic trust in homogeneous versus heterogeneous interorganizational dyads. Using a sample of 167 senior boundary spanners from the consulting industry, we found that diversity among team members from a partner organization undermines the experience of being trusted within demographically homogeneous dyads while it enhances the experience of being trusted within heterogeneous dyads. 

Williams, M. (with Evan Polman). “Where Colleagues Fear to Tread: How Gender Composition Influences Interpersonally Sensitive Behavior”

This paper investigates how gender composition affects workers’ propensity to engage in interpersonally sensitive behavior—behavior that is at the core of organizational phenomena such as interpersonal justice, affiliative citizenship and social support. Whereas gender-role socialization theory suggests that women may attend more to the emotions of others and engage in more interpersonally sensitive behavior than men, it is unclear how the gender of other team members influences one’s propensity to behave with interpersonal sensitivity. Competing perspectives exist. Individuals might pay less attention to the concerns of women because of women’s lower status as group members, or they might pay more attention to the concerns of women because of beliefs that women value empathy and nurturance more than men. Using data from 187 management consultants, we found that although female consultants did not engage in more interpersonally sensitive behavior than male consultants, consultants in general engaged in more interpersonally sensitive behavior when interacting with female clients. Further, as the proportion of women on a client team increased, individuals engaged in more interpersonally sensitive behavior.

Williams, M. 2001. “In whom we trust: Group membership as an affective context for trust development.” Academy of Management Review, 26(3), 377-396.

Examining the ways in which affect impacts the trust that develops between members of dissimilar groups broadens the study of trust development. People's perceptions of their own interdependence with other groups influence both their beliefs about group members' trustworthiness and their affect for group members. I propose that this affect, in turn, influences interpersonal trust development through multiple paths: cognitive, motivational, and behavioral. Using literature on social information processing, emotion, and intergroup behavior, I elucidate the social and affective context of trust development.

Trust and Affect:

Williams, M. 2001. “In whom we trust: Group membership as an affective context for trust development.” Academy of Management Review, 26(3), 377-396.

Examining the ways in which affect impacts the trust that develops between members of dissimilar groups broadens the study of trust development. People's perceptions of their own interdependence with other groups influence both their beliefs about group members' trustworthiness and their affect for group members. I propose that this affect, in turn, influences interpersonal trust development through multiple paths: cognitive, motivational, and behavioral. Using literature on social information processing, emotion, and intergroup behavior, I elucidate the social and affective context of trust development.

Williams, M. “Disentangling concepts: The role of affect in trust development and cooperation.” 2007 Annual Academy of Management Meetings, Philadelphia, PA.
(Winner Best Paper Award, Conflict Management Division)

The importance of trust for cooperative exchange is highly contested across the disciplines of psychology, sociology and economics. Although researchers from sociology, psychology, and organizational theory assert that affect influences trust, the role of affect and specific emotions in trust development and cooperative endeavors has not been clearly delineated. We contend that because affect—for example, feeling of sympathy, guilt and gratitude—can motivate cooperation independently from trust, it is only through the joint examination of affect and trust that we can reconcile conflicting perspectives and understand the unique role of trust in cooperative endeavors. This paper proposes an affective model of trust and cooperation that seeks to disentangle affect from trust and explicate the cognitive, motivational, and behavioral paths through which general affect and specific emotions influence both trust and cooperation.  By arguing that trust is only a partial mediator of the impact of affect on cooperation, we attempt to provide the missing variable that begins to explain when and why scholars who contend trust is irrelevant are likely to make this assertion.