At the Heart of Trust: Understanding the Integral Relationship Between Emotion and Trust.

This article focuses on advancing the understanding of the integral role of emotion in shaping interpersonal trust within organizational contexts. It reviews empirical research identifying two primary ways emotion influences trust: through the trustor's experienced emotions affecting cognitive appraisals, and through the trustee's expressed emotions serving as social signals that inform trustworthiness judgments. The authors propose an integrative model that incorporates a validated organizational trust framework—distinguishing trust from trustworthiness factors such as ability, benevolence, and integrity—and emphasizes the joint, interactive effects of experienced and expressed emotions on trust at multiple levels, including dyadic and network relationships. They highlight the dynamic, reciprocal nature of trust and emotion over time and call for future research to adopt multi-level, longitudinal, and dyadic methodologies to better capture these processes. The article also underscores practical implications for managing trust in organizations by recognizing the emotional as well as cognitive dimensions of trust-building, maintenance, and repair.