The Role of Trust in Stimulating the Innovative Activity of Industrial Employees

Abstract

The prospects of boosting the modernization of Russian industry necessitate the study of resources that might stimulate such endeavors. Contrary to the global literature, Russian publications mostly focus on the studies of generalized and institutional trust, as well as on the influence it exerts on modernization processes at the macro-level. Meanwhile, the impact of intra-firm trust as a factor, contributing to employee involvement in innovation, remains relatively misattended. Our purpose lies in encouraging the discussion of the presence of intra-firm trust and the effect trust has in furthering the processes of technological modernization. The intermediary tasks include the assessment of trust’s prevalence between colleagues, employees, and managers, as well as an analysis of the impact these types of trust have on the employees’ involvement into innovative activities at the enterprise level. The empirical ground for the study includes the results of a formalized survey of main industry workers conducted at three industrial enterprises in the Perm Territory in 2018-2019 (n = 450) using the method of a continuous survey of people present at their workplaces. The input of our research is due to the approach we propose to measure the horizontal trust by examining the vertical trust on several levels of organizational hierarchy; in addition, we employ an expanded list of indicators of employee involvement in innovation. The survey data are collected at three industrial plants. This helps to arrive at conclusions distinct from the published results of the studies of employees, sampled and surveyed per municipalities. Our results manifest the wide expansion of trust in organizations studied. However, we have not discovered any relationships between the organizational trust and actual employees involvement in the initiation and implementation of innovations. The impact of trust was detected only for the employees’ preparedness to take part in the ongoing projects. Thus, trust-building efforts at the workplace have a limited effect on employee involvement in innovations. We stress the importance of considering other factors that make the relationship between organizational trust and involvement in innovation more specific.