A Critique of Utilitarian Trust: The Case of the Dutch Insurance Sector

The organizational trust literature relies strongly on the notion of trust and trustworthiness as a calculative cause-and-efect relationship aimed at assessing the advantages and disadvantages between two actors. This utilitarian notion of trust has been critiqued by studies that highlight construct inconsistencies related to utilitarian trust, which, it is argued, is defcient, incomplete and misleading. Our empirical study of the Dutch insurance sector identifes and categorizes three process inconsistencies that help to explain why the calculation of trust in a utilitarian sense is seemingly impossible in practice and is a barrier to the unambiguous assessment of individual needs and individual utility. These process inconsistencies successively concern insufcient information, complex behavioural dynamics, and a convoluted pattern of stakeholder infuence to assess utility in trust relationships, specifcally within complex socio-economic systems. Our fndings contribute to the trust literature by proposing a classifcation of the previous critiques on utilitarian trust, and by showing that in scenarios of systematic rather than dyadic trust, process inconsistencies may be too strong to endure a ‘leap of faith’, at least with regard to suspension and assessing utilitarian trust in these more complex socio-economic systems.