Prior work has offered good arguments to trust both authentic and self-monitoring individuals, yet these two constructs have been described as incompatible and even opposite. This tension raises the question of which strategy will best build trust: Be yourself or adapt yourself? Informed by theory on private and public selves at work, this paper argues that both self-monitoring and authenticity behaviours foster trust, but only when not accompanied by the other behaviour. While actors can combine authenticity and self-monitoring in their self-concept, observers see this combination as lacking behavioural integrity (i.e. word-deed misalignment), thus reducing trust. We test these relationships in a time-lagged, multi-source survey study with project teams. Our results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that behavioural integrity mediates the interaction between authenticity and self-monitoring on perceptions of trust. We discuss the implications of our findings for the development and implementation of effective trust-building strategies.

先前的工作为信任真实和自我监控的个人提供了很好的论据，但这两种结构被描述为不相容甚至相反。这种紧张关系引发了一个问题，即哪种策略最能建立信任：做你自己还是适应自己？根据关于工作中的私人和公共自我的理论，本文认为自我监控和真实性行为都能促进信任，但只有在不伴随其他行为的情况下才会如此。虽然行为者可以在他们的自我概念中结合真实性和自我监控，但观察者认为这种结合缺乏行为完整性（即言行不一致），从而降低了信任度。我们在与项目团队的时间滞后、多源调查研究中测试这些关系。我们的结果支持该假设并证明行为完整性介导了真实性和自我监控对信任感的相互作用。我们讨论了我们的发现对制定和实施有效的信任建立策略的影响。