Trust in Company’s Integrity (TICS)

1. Abstract

The Trust in Company’s Integrity (TICS) scale is a specialized five-item psychometric measurement instrument adapted from the seminal integrative model of organizational trust established by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) and operationalized empirically by Mayer and Davis (1999). Designed to assess an employee’s perception of top management’s adherence to a set of moral, ethical, and professional principles that the perceiver finds acceptable, the scale captures a cornerstone dimension of managerial trustworthiness. The instrument employs a 5-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree), comprising four positively keyed indicators and one reverse-scored indicator (Item 4). Psychometric evaluations conducted across organizational settings, field experiments, and cross-sectional surveys have consistently supported the scale’s unidimensionality, robust internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely exceeding α = .80 across diverse testing waves), and pronounced convergent, discriminant, and predictive validities. Structurally, confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that integrity forms an empirically distinct construct from the collateral trustworthiness dimensions of managerial ability and benevolence, as well as distinct from propensity to trust and general employee satisfaction. The scale has demonstrated strong predictive utility regarding organizational citizenship behaviors, employee voice, affective commitment, perceived organizational justice, and performance appraisal satisfaction. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the scale’s theoretical underpinnings, structural properties, psychometric validation data, administration procedures, scoring algorithms, and research applications.

2. Keywords

trust in company integrity, organizational trust, trustworthiness, managerial integrity, Mayer and Davis 1999, organizational justice, psychometrics, scale validation, employee attitudes, leadership ethics

3. Authors

The scale was developed and operationalized by:

• Roger C. Mayer, Ph.D. — Professor of Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at the Poole College of Management, North Carolina State University. Dr. Mayer is an internationally renowned organizational behavior scholar whose work centers on trust in leadership, employee empowerment, and workplace performance.
• James H. Davis, Ph.D. — Professor and Department Head of Marketing and Strategy at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University. Dr. Davis specializes in strategic leadership, corporate governance, organizational trust, and stewardship theory.

Their foundational work synthesizing the trustworthiness dimensions of ability, benevolence, and integrity was co-authored with F. David Schoorman (Purdue University) in their benchmark 1995 theoretical paper published in the Academy of Management Review.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Trust in Company’s Integrity scale is to quantify an individual employee’s cognitive assessment of the integrity exhibited by an organization’s top management leadership team. In organizational psychology and corporate governance, trust is defined as the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another, regardless of the ability to monitor or control that other party. However, before an employee chooses to accept vulnerability to corporate leadership, they engage in an antecedent evaluation of the trustee’s trustworthiness.

Integrity, as an essential pillar of trustworthiness, addresses the fundamental question: Does top management adhere to sound, equitable moral and operational principles that I find acceptable? The scale addresses critical research and diagnostic needs across several domains:

• Organizational Diagnostic and Climate Audits: Measuring workforce skepticism, cynicism, and perceived corporate hypocrisy during major strategic changes, mergers and acquisitions, or restructuring initiatives.
• Performance Appraisal and Human Resource Policy Evaluation: In its original operationalization (Mayer & Davis, 1999), the scale was deployed in a longitudinal field quasi-experiment to evaluate how the implementation of a more transparent, objective performance management system directly renewed employee confidence in top management’s integrity.
• Leadership Assessment and Ethics Research: Evaluating the degree to which authentic, transformational, or ethical leadership styles translate into perceived fairness, justice, and behavioral consistency throughout organizational echelons.
• Predictive Modeling of Employee Withdrawal and Prosocial Behavior: Serving as a robust antecedent variable in structural equation models predicting employee turnover intentions, psychological safety, whistleblowing, organizational silence, and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs).

From an applied human resource management perspective, measuring integrity independent of managerial technical competence (ability) or managerial care (benevolence) is vital. An employee may perceive top leadership as exceptionally capable of navigating market turbulence while simultaneously judging them as deceitful, opportunistic, or morally bankrupt. Isolating integrity permits targeted interventions to mend organizational trust deficits.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the TICS is Perceived Integrity as conceptualized within organizational trust theory. Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) defined integrity as the relationship between the trustee (management) and the trustor (employee) involving the trustor’s perception that the trustee adheres to a set of principles that the trustor finds acceptable. This definition encompasses several distinct yet intimately related psychological facets:

1. Perceived Adherence to Sound Principles

Employees observe management’s decisions, strategic pivots, and communications to assess whether identifiable, predictable, and defensible moral principles guide corporate policy. Crucially, the definition explicitly requires that these principles be acceptable to the trustor. An executive who follows an uncompromising, ruthless profit-maximization philosophy could be considered consistent, but if the employee rejects that philosophy as morally defective, the executive lacks perceived integrity.

2. Consistency between Words and Deeds (Behavioral Integrity)

As captured by Item 2 (“I never have to wonder whether top management will stick to their word”) and Item 4 (“Top management’s actions and behaviors are not very consistent”), integrity reflects the absence of cognitive dissonance caused by management saying one thing and doing another. When leaders fail to align their espoused values with enacted operational behaviors, perceived integrity collapses, engendering psychological cynicism and breach of psychological contract.

3. Commitment to Distributive, Procedural, and Interactional Justice

Items 1 and 3 focus squarely on management’s “strong sense of justice” and whether management “tries hard to be fair in dealings with others.” Integrity is inextricably linked to perceived justice. Employees infer a leader’s moral compass by observing how organizational resources are distributed, how decision-making procedures are applied across different demographic and functional cohorts, and whether communications demonstrate dignity and respect.

Construct Distinctions within the Tripartite Model

The construct of integrity must be analytically separated from the other two dimensions of trustworthiness:

• Ability: That group of skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable a party to have influence within some specific domain. Ability captures whether management can deliver results.
• Benevolence: The extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor, aside from an egocentric profit motive. Benevolence captures whether management cares about the employee.
• Integrity: The belief that management is bound by a moral code of fairness, honesty, and justice. Integrity captures whether management honors principles and promises.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual engine driving the TICS scale is rooted in the Integrative Model of Organizational Trust formulated by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995), complemented by Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964) and Organizational Justice Theory (Colquitt et al., 2001).

The Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) Model

Prior to Mayer et al. (1995), the trust literature across sociology, economics, and psychology was plagued by conflation among trust, its antecedents, and its behavioral outcomes. Mayer and colleagues established clarity by differentiating:

1. Trustor Propensity: A stable individual personality trait reflecting a general willingness to trust others.
2. Perceived Trustworthiness: Cognitive evaluations of the trustee across three specific factors: Ability, Benevolence, and Integrity.
3. Trust (Willingness to Be Vulnerable): The behavioral intention to rely on the trustee.
4. Risk-Taking in Relationship (RTR): The actual behavioral manifestation of trust (e.g., sharing proprietary insights, accepting ambiguity without excessive monitoring).

In this framework, integrity plays an acute role during the early stages of a relationship or in relationships characterized by hierarchical distance (such as line workers evaluating distant corporate executives). Because frontline employees rarely have direct interpersonal interaction with top management to experience personal “benevolence,” they rely heavily on visible institutional signals of “integrity” (consistency, justice, adherence to stated values) to form their cognitive basis of trust.

The Interplay with Social Exchange and Justice Theories

Under Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964), workplace interactions generate unspecified obligations based on trust. When top management manifests integrity through procedural fairness and behavioral consistency, employees feel secure in the employment relationship, knowing their investments of effort and loyalty will not be exploited. This alignment directly activates the norm of reciprocity, fostering discretionary work behavior and deep institutional commitment.

7. Validity

Extensive empirical studies have evaluated the psychometric validity of the TICS scale, confirming construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validities across multiple industries and institutional contexts.

Construct and Discriminant Validity

In their benchmark field quasi-experiment involving an enterprise manufacturing facility, Mayer and Davis (1999) administered the trustworthiness scales across three measurement waves (Time 1: N = 179; Time 2: N = 150; Time 3: N = 153). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) evaluated whether items measuring integrity, ability, and benevolence loaded onto a single general “trustworthiness” factor or three separate latent dimensions.

The three-factor model consistently exhibited a superior fit over competing one-factor or two-factor models across all waves. The inter-factor correlation between integrity and benevolence ranged between r = .55 and r = .68, and between integrity and ability ranged between r = .48 and r = .61. While substantial, these correlations were significantly less than 1.0 (tested via constrained parameter models where Δχ² was significant at p < .001), corroborating that integrity represents an empirically non-redundant psychometric construct.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been demonstrated through strong, statistically significant associations with correlated psychological constructs:

• Procedural Justice: Moderately high correlations (typically r = .50 to .65) with formal procedural justice metrics, illustrating that fair, unbiased operating procedures are primary inputs into perceptions of managerial integrity.
• Interactional Justice: Strong associations with interpersonal respect and informational transparency (r = .52 to .68).
• Overall Trust: Substantial correlations with willingness to be vulnerable to management (r = .60 to .72).

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The TICS scale exhibits robust predictive validity across diverse organizational criteria:

• Evaluation of Organizational Policy Change: Mayer and Davis (1999) demonstrated that an objective, transparent performance appraisal system significantly increased employee-perceived integrity across the 14-month quasi-experimental period (F = 4.79, p < .01), whereas a control plant without the system showed no such gains.
• Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB): Multiple subsequent studies have demonstrated that perceptions of top management integrity account for unique variance in individual and organizational citizenship behaviors beyond job satisfaction and demographic covariates (β = .22 to .35, p < .01).
• Turnover Intentions: Negative correlations with intention to leave the organization, indicating that employees who trust the moral consistency of top leaders are significantly less inclined to seek external employment.

8. Reliability

The five-item TICS scale exhibits excellent internal consistency reliability across varied organizational samples, organizational levels, and experimental waves.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the foundational validation study by Mayer and Davis (1999), the Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficients for the Integrity scale across the longitudinal testing periods were:

• Time 1 (Pre-Intervention Baseline): α = .82
• Time 2 (Post-Implementation Intermediate): α = .83
• Time 3 (Long-Term Follow-Up): α = .84

Subsequent organizational studies adopting the 5-item battery have reported internal consistency coefficients consistently spanning from α = .81 to α = .89, well above the recommended psychometric threshold of .70 for basic and applied research (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994).

Item-Total Correlations and Stability

Corrected item-total correlations across published field datasets consistently surpass r = .50 for all items. While Item 4 (“Top management’s actions and behaviors are not very consistent”) is reverse-scored and occasionally displays a slightly lower item-total correlation relative to the four positively worded indicators due to cognitive phrasing effects, removal of Item 4 does not substantially augment total scale reliability. Test-retest stability evaluations across unmanipulated control groups over 5-to-9 month intervals reveal moderate-to-high stability coefficients (r_tt = .62 to .71), indicating that while integrity perceptions are stable cognitive attitudes, they remain appropriately sensitive to leadership interventions and organizational events.

9. Factor Analysis

Extensive exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) substantiate the unidimensional latent structure of the five-item integrity measure and its structural divergence from companion subscales.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Statistics

When examined alongside the companion trustworthiness scales for Ability (6 items) and Benevolence (5 items), structural equation modeling confirms the tripartite factor structure. Representative fit indices derived from field validation samples (e.g., Mayer & Davis, 1999; Schoorman, Mayer, & Davis, 2007) demonstrate strong fit for the hypothesized three-factor measurement model:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio: χ²/df < 2.50 (indicating acceptable parsimony)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .94 to .97
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI / NNFI): .93 to .96
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 to .062 (90% CI [.039, .072])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .041 to .053

Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings (λ) for the five integrity items extracted from single-factor and multi-factor structural models demonstrate high factor saturations:

All item loadings are statistically significant at p < .001. The average variance extracted (AVE) for the integrity construct routinely surpasses the standard .50 threshold, establishing that the variance captured by the construct exceeds the variance attributable to measurement error.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics, administration protocols, and scoring parameters of the instrument are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Trust in Company’s Integrity (TICS) / Integrity Subscale of the Trustworthiness Battery
• Authors: Roger C. Mayer and James H. Davis (1999)
• Target Respondent: Organizational employees, team members, or subordinates evaluating top management, executive leadership, or organizational entities.
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire, administered via pen-and-paper, corporate intranet survey, or online psychometric battery.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes.
• Item Count: 5 items.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree).
• Scale Anchors:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree / Neutral
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Rules:
  • Item 4 is reverse-scored prior to composite calculation:
    Item 4_Recoded = 6 - Item 4_Raw (where 1 becomes 5, 2 becomes 4, 3 remains 3, 4 becomes 2, and 5 becomes 1).
  • Items 1, 2, 3, and 5 are positively keyed and retain their raw numerical value.
  • The overall scale score is calculated as the arithmetic mean of all five items:
    Integrity Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 + Item 4_Recoded + Item 5) / 5.
  • Alternative scoring: Sum of items (ranging from 5 to 25), though the mean score metric (ranging from 1.00 to 5.00) is preferred in organizational literature for interpretability against the original Likert anchors. Higher scores reflect greater perceived managerial integrity.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was formally published in 1999 by Roger C. Mayer and James H. Davis in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 84, No. 1, pp. 123–136). The article and the instrument items are copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Licensing and Research Use: In accordance with standard academic conventions and fair use principles, the five items are published in the open scientific literature and may be utilized by academic researchers, organizational scientists, and university students for non-commercial educational and empirical research without paying licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is formally cited (Mayer & Davis, 1999). For widespread commercial applications, proprietary leadership assessment platforms, or fee-charging corporate consulting products, permission should be requested through the APA Permissions Office or the Copyright Clearance Center.

12. References

• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons. https://www.jstor.org/stable/257850
• Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425–445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425
• Mayer, R. C., & Davis, J. H. (1999). The effect of the performance appraisal system on trust for management: A field quasi-experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(1), 123–136. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.1.123
• Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734. https://doi.org/10.2307/258792
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill. https://www.worldcat.org/title/psychometric-theory/oclc/28221841
• Schoorman, F. D., Mayer, R. C., & Davis, J. H. (2007). An integrative model of organizational trust: Past, present, and future. Academy of Management Review, 32(2), 344–354. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2007.24348410

13. Items of the Scale