The Friction of Distance on Communication and Trust

Today, economic globalization has entered a new phase. Many industrial organizations have subsidiaries or strategic alliances all over the world. In order to succeed an era of no boundaries or no time zones, many organizations are engaged in transforming themselves into gigantic, decentralized, mass produced, and differentiated entities. And thus, national geographic, cultural, language and power difference will occur. As a result, different types of distance impact anorganization’s members’ inter-communication and trust relationships. This study explored the effect of distance (e.g. Power, emotion, physical) and communication (e.g. frequency and time) in four technology companies with a total of 124 mangers, associated managers and their supervisors in regards to managers and subordinates’ trust behavior. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of distance on communication and trust. The findings of this study are: (1) physical distance significantly positive influenced the frequency and duration of communication. (2) Emotional distance also has a significantly positive influence on the frequency of communication. (3) A significant positive influence occurred on the recognition of communication frequency and the superior’s trustworthiness and trust behavior. (4) Communication duration produced a significantly negative effect on recognition of trustworthy characteristics and the development of trust behavior. (5) The influence on most variables of trust behavior affects trustworthiness. The results show that despite close affection or frequent communication; trust behavior would not be developed in the absence of trustworthy characteristics. Validity tests supported these findings significantly in regards to distance, communication and equalization level of distance, communication frequency and communication duration towards trust behavior. Trustworthy characteristics and trust behavior scale, and various projection coefficients developed in this study provided tools of practical value to shorten distances strengthen equal authority, teamwork and the communication of organizational culture. Thus, these excellent tools can also be applied to a company’s recruitment process and staff training by integrating the trustworthy characteristics of integrity, consistency, ability as well as enabling the superior to establish trust behavior such as sharing, compliance and emulation.