Top Management Credibility and Employee Cynicism: A Comprehensive Model

By combining quantitative and qualitative methods of study, we develop a comprehensive model of top management behaviors, perceived credibility, and employee cynicism and outcomes. Specifically, we identify managerial behaviors that affect employees’ perceptions of two components of top management’s credibility—trustworthiness and competence—and examine how each of those components relates to employee cynicism. Top management competence and trustworthiness relate to different components of employee cynicism (cognitive, affective, and behavioral cynicism), and these dimensions of cynicism differentially relate to organizational commitment and self-assessed job performance. Content analysis of critical incidents revealed that different sets of managerial behaviors generate attributions of competence, incompetence, trustworthiness, and non-trustworthiness. This study and the resulting model open the door to more finely distilled research on management credibility and employee cynicism.