Employees wholeheartedly devoting to their job are not only the most precious property for business enterprises, but also a source of competitive advantage. Consequently, the successful management of employees is of central importance in determining the success of the firm. Understanding the way adopted by supervisors to develop interpersonal trust between supervisors and subordinates, and in turn motivate their subordinates to devote extra effort to in-role and extra-role behaviours has long been a topic of research interest to academicians and practitioners. However, precious research examining the effects of trust has focused predominantly on the relationships between subordinates’ trust in their supervisor and subsequent subordinate’s performance behaviors and job attitudes, little research has been done on whether trusting in subordinates or subordinates’ perceptions of being trusted will probably affect subordinates’ subsequent behaviors and the future relationship with supervisors. This study, with a focus on vertical interpersonal trust between supervisors and subordinates, examined the relationships of supervisors’ paternalistic leadership behavior (including benevolence, moral and authoritarianism leadership) to subordinates’ trust in and feeling trusted by their supervisors. Furthermore, we investigated the individual and interactive effects of trust in and feeling trusted by supervisors on subordinates’ job performance (including in-role and organizational citizenship behaviors). Two hundreds and seventy-one sales employees from five life insurance firms in Taiwan were sampled as subjects. Results of regression analysis indicated that supervisors’ benevolence and moral leadership had positively affected on subordinates’ trust in and feeling trusted by their supervisors, and subordinates’ feeling trusted also had positively influenced on their trust in supervisors. In addition, moderated regression analysis showed that the positive relationships of subordinates’ trust in supervisors to in-role behaviors and OCB were stronger when feeling trusted by supervisors is high. The findings also showed that the positive relationships of subordinates’ feeling trusted by supervisors to in-role behaviors and OCB were stronger when trust in supervisors is high. Finally, managerial implications for managers and directions for future research are suggested.
