Influence of Cultural Cognition, Social Aspect of Culture, and Personality on Trust

摘要

Trust is a critical variable in military operations, be it trust in leadership and trust among team members. Trust can become complicated as operations cross-national borders. The purpose of this series of studies is to examine the trust process across cultures comparing the United States, Malaysia, and Australia. The study found country differences in Analytic-Holistic thinking, preference for Power Distance, need for cognition and trust propensity. Firstly, in terms of race differences within Malaysia, only differences were found in openness to experience and power distance, suggesting similar patterns amongst Malaysians in most of the variables of interest in the study. In terms of analytic-holistic thinking, it was found that Malaysia was more holistic followed by Australia and US whereas for Power Distance, Malaysia was the lowest followed by Australia and then US. Need for cognition was such that Australia was higher than US while US had higher trust propensity scores when compared to Malaysia and Australia. For countries higher in analytic thinking, there was a higher tendency to rate applicants with higher ability as more trustworthy; however, US rated applicants with higher benevolence as more trustworthy when compared to Malaysia, contradictory to present review of literature. On a whole, Malaysia was observed to be generally low on trust. Power Distance was the main contributor for higher trust in ability and cultural dimensions were found to predict integrity significantly whereby higher Need for Cognition and Power Distance were associated with higher trust in integrity. Power distance seemed to be the stronger predictor for trust in this study. Findings were discussed in terms of in-group and out-group differences, attributes of Generation Y, and trust climate.