Concepto de muerte y definición de pena de muerte

Future research needs to address a number of limitations. Despite the contribution of the current research there remains a scarcity of studies examining the conceptualisation of interpersonal trust and the antecedents of distrust within the context of Jordanian organisations or in collectivist cultures. Further replication in Jordanian organisations or in countries that have a collectivist culture is required.

Another limitation relates to the representativeness of the sample and the external validity of findings. Although the sample was drawn from a number of industries to improve the generalizability of findings to more than one organisational setting, it was not representative of all employees in Jordan, since it was drawn only from organisations located in the capital Amman. The sample size was also at the minimum recommended size for grounded theory studies (20 participants). Future research should attempt to replicate these findings using larger samples that are drawn from geographically separated organisations and if possible from different countries with collectivist cultures to improve the generalizability of findings.

One limitation of this study is related to the use of priori codes/categories (i.e. elements of trust definitions and categories for trust antecedents that are available in the trust literature and available in theoretical models of trust) to guide the coding process.

According to Creswell (2007) using prefigured codes from theoretical models/the literature can limit the analysis to these pre-existing codes instead of opening up the codes to reflect the views of interviewees. Thus, the use of the elements present in trust definitions (noted by trust researchers) and the categories of antecedents presented in Mayer et al.’s (1995) trust model as a guide for coding the interview data may have biased the results in the sense that it may have limited the analysis to these codes and prevented the identification of new antecedent categories during the analysis.

161 Furthermore, the first coder’s (i.e. the researcher) prior knowledge about these pre-existing codes may have led the researcher to pre-judge the coding of the interviews and affected the way he looked at the interview data when coding it. To counter this potential for bias as much as possible, the first coder (i.e. the researcher) followed the same instruction followed by the second coder. That is, to identify all he can in terms of themes and antecedents in interviewee responses. This required from the researcher to not limit his coding of the data to any prior knowledge he has of priori codes and instead to look for additional codes that might emerge from the data. Furthermore, to also counter this potential bias, another coder was asked to code the interview data separately from the first coder. As described in the methods chapter for this study (chapter two), in the beginning of the analysis process, the interview data was coded separately by two coders and even though the first coder (i.e. the researcher) had prior knowledge of these pre-existing codes (which may affected his coding process), the second coder did not have any prior knowledge of these priori codes.

In addition, to ensure that the second coder conduct the coding without any prior knowledge of the pre-existing codes, the researcher made sure that this coder was studying a different discipline than that of the researcher and no instructions were given to this coder to look for certain elements/antecedents in the responses (that is, no information were given to this coder on pre-existing codes), instead, this coder was only instructed to list all that he can identify in terms of themes present in responses about trust definitions and antecedents stated or implied in an interviewee’s responses for questions exploring the antecedents of trust in a co-worker. Thus, this procedure (i.e. the use of a second coder with no prior knowledge of the codes) was followed in order to limit (as much as possible) any effects of the researcher having prior knowledge of these codes on him pre-judging the coding of the interview data. Initially, the researcher wanted to find two Arabic speaking coders (other than himself) to code the interview data, however, only one was welling and available at the time.

It should also be noted that the first stage (noted earlier) of coding the interview data (which consisted of the two coders separately coding the data and then meeting to discuss the lists of themes and antecedents each produced and agree on unified lists) was not based on pre-existing codes or categories (at least for the second coder), the coding of the data according to pre-existing codes was officially done by the researcher in a later stage of the analysis (see chapter two). This procedure was necessitated by the

162 objectives of the qualitative study (noted in chapter one) which were to compare the Jordanian employees’ conceptualisations and antecedents of trust to those identified in western models of trust (i.e. the Mayer et al.’s trust model) and one way to do that was to see if the lists of themes and antecedents agreed upon by the two coders in the first stage of analysis fell into the pre-existing categories or codes that can be identified in the western literature on trust.

In terms of recommendations for future research using this same approach of analysing the data (i.e. using priori or pre-existing codes), Creswell (2007, p.152) “encourage the researchers to be open to additional codes emerging during the analysis”. Furthermore, future researchers should seek to recruit more than one coder with no prior knowledge of pre-existing codes and attempt to distance themselves from the coding process as much as their resources, circumstances and research requirements may allow so that their prior knowledge of pre-existing codes will not have any influence on the coding process.

Other concerns may relate to the use of qualitative methods, though Lewicki et al.

(2006) view them as having high external validity and to the internal validity of results.

Future research should attempt to triangulate qualitative findings with survey data to improve internal validity. As discussed in chapter two, this thesis attempts to overcome threats to validity by triangulating some of these findings with findings derived from survey data.

Given that this is part of a PhD thesis, there were time and resources limitations that limited the scope of the study and the ability to conduct interviews with a larger number of participants. Future research could also examine the antecedents of trust in other trust referents, possibly within collectivist cultures. Finally, future quantitative research can capitalize on findings regarding the role of predictability, identification and reciprocity in the development of trust in co-workers.

4.8 Summary

The first study presented in this thesis reported the results of a qualitative investigation of the nature of trust and the determinants of co-worker trust and distrust in the context of Jordanian organisations operating within a collectivist culture. The study found that

163 employees working in Jordanian organisations viewed and defined interpersonal trust in terms of having the willingness to be vulnerable to the trustee and having positive expectations of the trustee’s future actions. This conceptualization of trust is in line with what is proposed by most of the popular conceptualizations of trust in existing trust literature.

The findings pertaining to the antecedents of trust indicate that the determinants of co-worker trust within Jordanian organisations are in line with what is proposed by existing trust literature. Later findings pertaining to the antecedents of distrust supported the assumption that distrust (not trusting) is a result of a lack of perceived ability, benevolence and integrity of the referent.

Moreover, the findings highlighted the role of culture in determining the relative importance of trustworthiness factors in trust development. Benevolence (or lack of it) was always the most critical factor in predicting co-worker trust, and distrust, respectively in the Jordanian context.

Finally, the findings validate the use of extant trust models along with their respective measures of trust and trustworthiness for the examination of trust in the context of work relationships within Jordanian organisations, the central topic of this thesis.

As noted previously, the following three chapters are concerned with addressing research questions three to six and empirically testing the hypotheses developed in chapter one. The next chapter starts this process by providing a description of the methods and procedures used to collect quantitative data. Similar to chapter two, the following chapter will start by justifying the use of questionnaires as a data collection tool and then describing the procedures followed to gain access, recruit participant, translate and pilot test the questionnaire. The measures used in the questionnaire are also presented and ethical considerations are also addressed throughout the chapter.

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