Exploring the effects of agent trust and benevolence in a simulated organizational task

0Executives argue intuitively that trust is critical to effective organizat ional performance. Although articulated as a cognitive/affective property o f individuals, the collective effect of events influencing (and being influ enced by) trust judgments must certainly impact organizational behavior. To begin to explore this, we conducted a simulation study of trust and organi zational performance. Specifically, we defined a set of computational agent s, each with a trust function capable of evaluating the quality of advice f i om the other agents, and rendering judgments on the trustworthiness of th e communicating agent. As agent judgments impact subsequent choices to acce pt or to generate communications, organizational performance is influenced. We manipulated two agent properties (trustworthiness, benevolence), two or ganizational variables (group size, group homogeneity/liar-to-honest ratio) , and one environmental variable (stable, unstable). Results indicate that in homogeneous groups, honest groups did better than groups of liars, but u nder environmental instability, benevolent groups did worse. Under all cond itions for heterogeneous groups, it only took one to three liars to degrade organizational performance.