A communicative perspective on the trust-control link in Russia

Abstract

The question of whether trust complements or substitutes control continues to be debated in the literature. We contribute to this debate by adopting a communicative perspective on the trust-control link in Russia. Our qualitative study reveals dialectics in the trust-control link. Russian managers used various communicative activities to simultaneously nurture trust and exercise control towards their subordinates, indicating complementarity. By contrast, from an intercultural communicative perspective the Finnish expatriates failed to see this complementarity and regarded trust and control as substitutes. The dialectical perspective reveals the interplay between content and context of a message and their complementarity in communication.