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Introduction
Humans are social beings who are frequently involved in social exchange relationships. In order for such relationships to work well, people need to trust one another; hence, trust is a fundamental aspect of social life ([21] Igarashi et al. , 2008). This is no different in the workplace. Interpersonal trust is a vital component of effective working relationships ([18] Ferris et al. , 2009; [20] Gill et al. , 2005) and has been found to be related to affective organizational commitment (e.g. [33] Poon et al. , 2006), willingness to help co-workers (e.g. [32] Poon, 2006), perception of workgroup cohesion ([43] Thau et al. , 2007, Study 1), willingness to share resources ([17] Dirks and Skarlicki, 2009, Study 2), intentions to quit ([4] Brower et al. , 2009), and various facets of job performance including task performance, contextual performance, and workplace deviance (e.g. [2] Atkinson, 2007; [11] Colquitt et al. , 2007; [16] Dirks and Ferrin, 2002). Thus, in the absence of external control mechanisms, there are various practical benefits to fostering trust in the workplace, especially employees' trust toward their immediate supervisor. Supervisors have considerable influence on employee attitudes and behaviors; therefore, there is a need to understand why some supervisors are trusted and others less so.
To address the above issue, I drew on the conceptual framework of [29] Mayer et al. (1995) to test a model of trust-in-supervisor that examined trustee attributes (i.e. benevolence, integrity, and ability) as predictors of trust-in-supervisor. To date, although there is research evidence that benevolence, integrity, and ability have statistically significant, unique effects on trust (see [11] Colquitt et al. , 2007 for a meta-analytic review), it is uncertain how these three variables interact to predict trust. Given that [29] Mayer et al. (1995) did suggest that benevolence, integrity, and ability might work interactively to predict trust and the recent call by scholars for research that examines whether or not all three variables are necessary for forming trust (cf. [5] Burke et al. , 2007) and how various trustworthiness variables work in conjunction with each other (cf. [17] Dirks and Skarlicki, 2009), my primary objective in this study was to examine whether or not the effects of benevolence, integrity, and ability on trust might also...