Abstract

Far from agreement, the uneven definitions of trust indicate the difficulty in encapsulating this psychological state in a single and precise idea. Uncovering the everyday concept of trust can show the need for a different approach to its definition. To this aim, 16 expatriates of several international cooperation organizations around the world gave their views through an electronic Delphi process declaring they do not associate trust with risk or vulnerability, which does not correspond with the more widespread definition of trust in work and organizational psychology. Instead, trust appears as an evaluation that ensures outcomes as well as an understanding of them. A cluster of several central ideas in the everyday concept highlights that different practices can be designed to build or recover trust in different scenarios.