Reframing Trust in Leadership Studies

Abstract

There is growing interest in the leadership field on relational approaches, what has been called “leadership in the plural” because of the emphasis on its collective dimensions. Recent assessments note, however, that its ideas have not yet been fully articulated in a testable way to develop an all-embracing and integrated theoretical perspective. We argue in this paper that the construct of “trust” can be helpful to develop a theoretically informed empirical research agenda to further advance the theory of relational leadership. The purpose of this paper is to develop some testable propositions to study leadership and trust empirically, using a constructionist perspective of relational leadership theory. To advance this agenda, we engage in a paradigmatic interplay that helps to integrate what we know of the relationship leadership-trust within the two perspectives that dominate the relational leadership literature, beyond the differences in their philosophical positions.