W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State U., United States
Trust is a fundamental aspect of effective leadership. Accordingly, imparting the nature and importance of trust-building behaviors is one of the key objectives of leadership development efforts. But it is not enough to teach trust-building behaviors. At a more basic level, students need to develop values regarding the importance of building trust as a leader if they are to ultimately engage in trust-building behaviors themselves. Drawing on social cognitive theory and communications research on media selection, we theorize that video cases could be an effective way to increase students’ perceptions of the importance of building trust via vicarious learning, especially for students with higher trust-building self-efficacy. We test these predictions with two experiments, conducted with undergraduate business students and working professionals, respectively. Our findings confirm that video cases (compared to text cases) are more effective for imparting the importance of building trust as a leader. We discuss the theoretical implications for social cognitive theory and research on media selection, as well as the practical implications for leadership educators.
