Decision-Making Style and Trusting Stance At The Workplace: A Socio-Cultural Approach

Abstract

The goal of this submission is to outline a conceptual framework for the empirical measurement of trust in digital business transactions within organisations. The framework yields a scaffold for a comparative analysis of business behaviour in different markets to find out the degree of trust towards data protection. Inspired by work in cultural studies and sociology (Bauman) this article assumes a new dimension of trust as liquid or solid. Liquid trust is defined as ephemeral, access based, and dematerialized, while solid trust is defined as enduring, and material. At the modern workplace, everyday people are exposed to ICTs, that often cross boundaries between professional and private life. In order to grasp individual decision-making style and trusting stance at the workplace a socio-cultural approach to trust is extended through perspectives from psychology. The psychology of cognition suggests that people are often overconfident about the accuracy of their knowledge, which may be why they inhibit critical thinking, when less is at stake. On the one side there is the risk of data breaches and on the other side there is an at times overcautious interpretation of data protection principles at the workplace. It seems as though the modern trust generates its other--the digital non-trustworthy or the ethicless design of a digital world. While exploring trust through empirical study, we want to find out, whether decision-makers, prefer rational-analytic thinking (slow) or intuitive and automatic (rapid) thinking. These insights are used to examine, whether different thinking styles are related to the endorsement of trust in data protection and digital literacy. The practical implications of this research stream highlight demands for workplace learning that align individual differences in decision-making with new dimensions of trust in business transactions and the implementation of data protection principles.