ABSTRACT
With organizations and their executives frequently in the news for violating the trust of their customers and shareholders, U.S. business schools who train many of these executive decision makers have begun to require courses in business ethics. While ethics is a subject area that can be taught, instilling ethical behaviour and trustworthiness may be more complicated. The chapters in this book have shed light on the importance of trustworthiness not just for preventing unethical behaviour but for leader–follower relationships (e.g. Chapter 26 by Den Hartog, this volume; Chapter 5 by Lyu & Ferrin, this volume), entrepreneurs (Chapter 23 by Williams and Shepherd, this volume), teams (Chapter 6 by Nienaber, Holtgrave and Romeike, this volume) and inter-organizational relationships (Chapter 7 by Brattström and Bachmann, this volume; see also Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012 for a review).
