"Gender and Trust: Their Effect on Shared Responsibility, Knowledge Sharing and OCB"

We explore the impact of trust along with the moderating effect of gender on sharing responsibility, sharing knowledge, and other forms of organizational citizenship behavior among 308 employees and 71 supervisors in China’s manufacturing sector. Using a survey methodology, descriptive statistics, correlation, confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical moderated regression we demonstrate that both affect- and cognition-based trust positively impact shared responsibility, knowledge-sharing behavior, OCB-I and OCB-O. In addition, the gender of subordinates alters the relationship between both forms of trust and shared responsibility and OCB-O, but not knowledge-sharing behavior and OCB-I. We find that cognition-based trust plays a crucial role for male subordinates while affect-based trust is more relevant to female subordinates. Finally, we show that while the gender of the supervisor moderates the impact of both affect- and cognition-based trust, it is significant for female subordinates only, thus endorsing the gender similarity effect.