Measuring Trust in Companies

This paper is going to deal with the topic of trust within real existing leadership relations. The design tries to test trust and trustworthiness in ongoing relations of leaders and followers in existing companies in order to gain more validity of data than other designs, often using students as probants. The paper first discusses traditional ways of measuring trust – mostly done by questionnaires and illuminates their weaknesses. Then a different way is going to be described by adopting and adapting the trust game to make it applicable in companies. The design focusses on real decisions regarding trusting and trustworthy behavior by putting the participants into situations where they have to transfer virtual money. Additional questions about the demographic background of the participants are formulated. Also a guideline for the implementation of the experiment in companies has been formulated.