Unternehmensplanung und Controlling

Trust Repair Through Reporting in the Banking Sector

The general research question of this project is on how companies repair trust relationships to its stakeholders once they are damaged. The specific aim is to conceptualize and empirically analyse the issue of trust rebuilding through reporting in the banking sector. In series with the massive profit drop downs in the financial sector stakeholder trust has been significantly destroyed. Trust is seen as one of the main factors for successful and sustainable banking.

We contend that psychological theory can offer insights into how trust builds, grows and declines. In a mixed-method design we deploy a framework of trust repair to analyse annual reports of banking companies, to explore which tactics they use to rebuild trust and which ones lead to successful trust repair.
Stakeholders regularly use processes of cognitive attribution  to reduce uncertainty and gather information by making assumptions regarding past events. According to Weiner (1985, 1995) they use three, more or less independent, attribution dimensions.

Moreover, some scholars suggest so called “social accounts” for trust rebuilding. Although the annual financial report is a main device to communicate with all stakeholders and its content as well as its representation is likely to affect the trust rebuilding process, there are no content-analytical approaches that explore trust rebuilding in the banking sector. We close this gap by applying a mixed-methods design, combining a qualitative content analysis of the presidents letters with quantitative web-based quasi-experiments.

Ansprechpartner:
Dipl.-Kfm. Max Kury 
Prof. Dr. Rolf Brühl