Chapter 7: Trust Therapy: The Effects of Impact and Intent Strategies on Trust Repair

In recent years, our economy has been battered with a relentless and unprecedented wave of corporate scandals that has sent shocks to the very core of our market system. Hardly a day passes without a new report of audacious executive greed or editorial commentary on the need to repair the trust so vital to nurturing and sustaining the lifeblood of professional relations. Corporate responses range from apologies without substantive victim compensation to settlements without any admission of wrongdoing. All of this has taken a tremendous toll on trust in corporate America. But while scholars have developed a vast litany of treatises on the nature and benefits of trust (e.g., Kramer, 1999; Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998), research has only recently begun to systematically explore how to repair trust after it has been broken (e.g., Dirks, Lewicki, & Zaheer, 2009; Kim, Ferrin, Cooper, & Dirks, 2004; Nakayachi & Watabe, 2005; Schweitzer, Hershey, & Bradlow, 2003; Tomlinson & Mayer, 2009).