Since Chinese economic reforms started in 1978, frequent changes of leaders in Chinese enterprises have demanded that employees should come to trust their new leaders quickly in order to work together well. However, little empirical research has been done to investigate the formation of trust towards a new leader in the Chinese context. Previous research on South Koreans showed that reading information about a new leader's trustworthiness could increase explicit (conscious evaluation of a new leader) and implicit (non-conscious associations between a new leader and trust) trust (Kim et al., 2010). The present research aimed to explore Chinese people's formation of leader trust by measuring explicit and implicit aspects.
Study 1 investigated what levels of leader trust existed at the beginning, and whether information about a new leader's trustworthiness would cause trust to increase. Study 2 examined how positive or negative rumors about a new leader would influence the formation of explicit and implicit trust.
In Study 1, participants read a brief profile about a fictional Chinese historical leader called 'Rongfei Zhang' and completed a Pre-test (explicit and implicit trust measures). Participants were randomly assigned to two experimental groups: the Information group read specific information about the new leader's trustworthiness; the Conditioning group conducted a lexical decision task strengthening associations of the new leader with trust, and the control group took a break for 10 minutes. The same measures were used in the Post-test. In Study 2, participants read positive or negative rumors about a new leader in an organization then completed the same procedures as Study 1.
In both Study 1 and 2, a one-sample t-test in the Pre-test measures showed higher than neutral affect-based trust and implicit trust across all conditions. Also, in both studies, analyses revealed the information group showed significantly increased affect- and cognition-based explicit trust compared to the control group. In Study 1, manipulation effect was not found in implicit trust. In Study 2, positive rumors resulted in significantly higher explicit trust than negative rumors in the Pre-test, but there were no significant differences in implicit trust. Furthermore, information effect was found in implicit trust when receiving positive or negative rumors at first and conditioning effect only existed in the positive rumor group, but not in the negative rumor group.
The findings revealed that Chinese people were willing to show trust towards a new leader at the beginning even though they received negative rumors. Explicit trust could be developed due to specific information about a new leader‟s trustworthiness. While it needed repeated stimuli to increase implicit trust towards a new leader due to strong influence of Chinese leadership culture (i.e., high power distance and high context).