Dyadic trust in sport: a theoretical and integrative review

There is a widely held assumption within sport that building trust – among athletes, coaches, or support staff – is critical for achieving individual and team success as well as promoting member well-being. Despite this notion, limited attention in the field of sport psychology has been devoted to the theoretical bases that underpin trust with regard to its conceptual features, antecedents, and consequences. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an integrative review culminating in a theoretical framework on dyadic trust in sport. We draw from the extant trust literatures across a range of disciplines (e.g. organizational, social psychology), embracing the strengths of existing approaches while addressing their conceptual and operational limitations, to advance a reconstituted multidimensional conceptualization of trust. Within our reformulated framework, we consider trust to be a psychological state that is performance and/or person-oriented. Further, trust is composed of expectations (i.e. instrumental and affective) and the intention to accept vulnerability (i.e. reliance and disclosure). In addition, we propose putative inputs to, and outputs of, trust. This framework can be used to guide the development of trust-related research questionsand provides a road map for high-quality science centered on the construct of trust within sport.