The author posits that organizational trust represents a premise and condition for creating good organizational working conditions. On this basis, this book explores data collected from two rounds of massive questionnaire-based surveys in 2007 and 2017 from the perspective of the sociological theory of trust functionalities, and examined the structure and functions of organizational trust among the present-day urban employees in China using the statistical analysis approach. General trust level within the present-day Chinese organizations was tested. The result of statistical analysis shows that the weighted mean of the vertical trust index within organizations hiring Chinese urban employees in 2017 is 52.68 (in a full score of 100 points), the weighted mean of the horizontal trust index is 60.09 points, and the weighted mean of the institutional trust index is 55.43 points. Generally, organizational trust is at a middle or lower level and presents an imbalanced developing trend.  Such a result is basically consistent with people's perception about a trust crisis within their working environments. Despite this, compared with 2007, the organizational trust level in 2017 (with indexes remaining the same) still showed a significantly improved trend, shining a light of hope amid crisis.

Our data analysis shows that the surveys obtained from the organizational trust scales in both 2007 and 2017 point to a significantly negative relationship between interpersonal and institutional trust. Such a finding is of a great significance because it forces us to rethink and re-examine these two different natures of trust phenomena at a greater depth. Statistics show that over the 10 years from 2007 to 2017, the magnitude of the rise in institutional trust is significantly higher than that of the interpersonal trust. Does this indicate that the legal-rational authority based on the bureaucratic system could truly eliminate the “man-made” uncertainties and is destined to become the eventual form of management in modern organizations? Such a question represents a direction towards which future research should be headed.

Additionally, the author finds that the effect of factors of objective working conditions on vertical and horizontal trust varies. Factors of objective working conditions exert a far greater effect on vertical trust (△R2=7.1%) than it does on horizontal trust (△R2=3.4%), and the specific influencing factors also differ significantly. However, the overall influence of factors pertaining to the interactive cognitive evaluation on horizontal trust (△R2=30%) is higher than that on vertical trust (△R2=20.9%).  Our data analysis also shows that the factors pertaining to institutional arrangements of objective working conditions exert the largest influences among the four independent variable groups, with a contribution rate of deterministic coefficient reaching 4%. To sum up, we have basically identified the majority of specific factors influencing changes in interpersonal trust through an array of regression analyses of trust (the explanatory power of the population variance of the horizontal trust is about 48%), but many important factors influencing institutional trust are still unknown to us (the explanatory power of the population variance of the horizontal trust is only 11%). Continued efforts are still needed to tackle the question as to what key factors shaping institutional trust exactly are.

Finally, the author incorporates the data collected from two rounds of questionnaire-based surveys in 2007 and 2017 in an empirical validation of the said functions of trust using mediation or moderation analysis model. The results show that the mediating effect of interpersonal trust between the objective interactive conditions and organizational commitment is validated; the moderating effect of institutional trust between the objective working life conditions and work sentiments is also, to some degree, empirically validated; the mediating effect of organizational trust between the objective job characteristics and organizational commitment behaviors is basically validated; the mediating effect of organizational trust between the objective communication conditions and personal voice inclination is validated; and finally, the moderating effect of organizational trust, especially leadership trust, between organizational anomie and individuals’ inclination for institutionalized protection of rights is also validated.  In conclusion, trust as a subjective psychological working condition, indeed exerts a mediating or moderating effect between objective working conditions and outcomes of individual behaviors.