Journal of Student Research 2018

31 The Correlates of Trust Amongst Coworkers similarity measures. Once each of these measures was completed, participants ended the survey with the demographics section (Appendix D). Participants who were currently employed and working on team-based projects were asked to complete a survey online to rate their experience with a previous team-based project at work. Before answering the items, participants were asked to think about the most recent experience they had working as a team in their job. Participants were asked to respond to measures of trust, perceived similarity, and team satisfaction, as well as some demographic questions. Following the study was a debriefing statement before exiting the survey software. It was hypothesized that perceiving oneself as similar to one’s coworkers would be positively correlated with the reporting of trust toward one’s work group. In order to test this, a set of Pearson’s correlations were conducted to examine the relationship between the measures of trust and perceived similarity. As expected, trust overall was positively correlated with perceived similarity r = .39, p = .001, n = 69, R 2 = 0.15. Similarly, many of the subscales of trust were also found to positively relate to perceived similarity: propensity to trust, r = .35, p = .003, n = 69, R 2 = 0.12; perceived trustworthiness, r = .41, p < .001, n = 69, R 2 = 0.17; cooperative behaviors, r = .37, p = .002, n = 69, R 2 = 0.14. Although it was predicted that monitoring behaviors would be negatively correlated with perceived similarity, interestingly, the two variables were unrelated in this study, r = .01, p = .98, n = 69, R 2 < 0.01. Table 1 Summary of Intercorrelations, Means, and Standard Deviations for the measures of trust, perceived similarity, and team satisfaction for both men and women Table 1 Summary of Interactions, Means, and Standard Deviations for the measures of trust, percieved similarity and team satisfaction for both men and women Results

Measure

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1.Trust Overall

-

2. Propensity to Trust

.88**

-

3. Perceived Trustworthiness .92**

.79** .72**

-

4. Cooperative Behaviors 5. Monitoring Behaviors 6. Perceived Similarity

.91** .31** .39** .75**

.80**

-

.06

.07

.19

-

.35** .74**

.41** .76**

.37** .00 .68** -.03

-

7. Team Satisfaction

.45**

-

M

4.75 0.77

5.02 0.93

4.89 0.99

4.95 0.88

3.57 1.09

5.61 1.14

3.30 0.60

SD

Note. * p < .05; ** p < .01, n = 69