Helping More Won’t Always Earn You More Trust: The Role of Power

One of the most effective ways to earn the trust of other organizational members is through helping others. Helping, however, comes at a cost because it drains the resources of helpers, which can contribute to them burning out. It is therefore important for organizational members to strike a balance between providing enough help to build trust without overextending their resources. Hence, it is worth exploring if there is an optimal level of help to foster interpersonal trust. We argue that the location of this optimal point differs depending on organizational member’s relative access to resources, that is, their relative power. Specifically, we argue that for less powerful organizational members the benefit of providing help on received trust diminishes as help increases. In contrast, for more powerful organizational members this is not the case, helping increases received trust in a linear fashion. We further propose that this effect is mediated by justice perceptions because more powerful organizational members have an expectancy to be generous, while less powerful organizational members do not have this expectancy. We find evidence to support our hypotheses in an incentivized behavioral experiment where we manipulated structural power among interaction partners and in a field study among employees of various organizations.