Building trustworthiness: Leadership self-portraits

Successful leadership establishes relationships with followers based on trust. This study examines leadership capabilities that build trustworthiness and untrustworthiness. We address three conditions that influence building the trustworthiness (as well as untrustworthiness) of a leader: communication, cognitive diversity, and inspiring and engaging people. Since building trustworthiness is a socially complex phenomenon, we use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to discover alternative configurations that lead to leaders´ trustworthiness and also those leading to leaders´ untrustworthiness. The study uses data from 116 leaders around the globe collected by an online survey. The findings reveal that the three conditions contribute to leaders´ trustworthiness. Concerning leaders´ untrustworthiness, results highlight the peril of the lack of communication. Notably, the lack of cognitive diversity and not inspiring and engaging people are substitutes in the development of untrustworthiness. Our results suggest trustworthiness and untrustworthiness are independent and they coexist since they result from non-symmetric configurations. The study's originality regards the empirical evidence on building trustworthiness and untrustworthiness and the theoretical and managerial consequences. Theoretical implications emerge from the configuration that leads to untrustworthiness and the repercussions in trusting the leaders. Managerial contributions of the study regard the suggestion of distinct combinations of behaviors to develop trustworthiness and avoid untrustworthiness, aiming for followers to trust the leaders and escaping from distrusting them. We acknowledge the study limitations and offer tips for further develop the field by expanding studies.