
Trust at work: Key concepts and definitions
Trust is at the heart of people’s experience at work. A positive experience strengthens trust. But in order to have a positive experience there needs to be some degree of trust in the first place. For example, a positive experience could be that my manager gives me useful feedback, which helps me improve the way I support a customer. And I feel a stronger sense of achievement as a result. But I need to trust my manager to some degree already, in order to be open to receive the feedback constructively. This kind of situation is repeated throughout the work day in myriad ways.
Below, I look at some of the key concepts and definitions related to trust at work. The literature on trust is vast, so I will only scratch the surface. I will focus on the changing nature of the employment relationship and the trends associated with the future of work. And I will also highlight the different ways in which trust is measured and how trust is linked to organisational performance.
Definitions of trust
Trust is hard to define because it is contingent (it always depends on the context) and dynamic (it changes based on the nature of a relationship). Some key concepts include:
- Trust is a process, meaning there are phases and episodes through which trust is formed and eroded. As such, trust is cumulative, the sum of personal experience and recurring exchanges. There are key moments when trust is tested by critical incidents. And there are conditions that lead to trusted relationships being more likely to form at those key moments.
- For example, trustors need to have a propensity to trust and a degree of vulnerability, which is the partly a result of personal characteristics, norms and also incentives.
- In addition, trustees need to have earned some degree of trustworthiness, which is the result of an assessment of their competence, integrity and benevolence.
- Because an assessment is required, trust is cognitive. In other words, it is based on what I know. Once I have relevant knowledge of your character, your competence, your reliability, then my knowledge constitutes my degree of trust or distrust. In this way, transparency and openness, as well as misinformation and bias, can influence trust. For Russell Hardin, at the heart of a trusted relationship is the knowledge of encapsulated interests. By this he means: “I know you have an interest in fulfilling my trust in you (you encapsulate my interest in your own)”.[1]
- Trust is also a form of social capital within a group or a community. It depends on reciprocity and exchange. Francis Fukayma emphasises the importance of what he calls “spontaneous sociability”. For Fukuyama, “trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behaviour based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community.”[2]
Given all of the above, Mayer et al provide an integrative model of trust which pulls together these different strands. They define trust as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party”.[3]
Forms of trust
The most obvious form of trust is interpersonal and dyadic, i.e. between two individuals. And much work on the psychology of trust has involved measuring this through game play, especially versions of the prisoner’s dilemma. In the usual version of this scenario, two suspects have been arrested and are being interrogated in separate rooms. Each prisoner can either confess (and implicate the other) or they can keep silent and hope the other person does the same. The concept of the prisoner’s dilemma was developed by RAND Corporation scientists Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher and was formalized by the mathematician Albert Tucker.[4]
However, trust is also commonly seen as working across levels, including individual-to-organisation and even more broadly as generalised trust. It is the perceived decline in individual-to-organisation trust that is felt to be at the heart of a trust crisis in developed economies like the USA and UK.
Most evidence here comes from surveys, such as the General Social Survey run by NORC at the University of Chicago since 1972 and NatCen’s British Social Attitudes Survey which has been run since 1983. Both surveys highlight a rising degree of scepticism towards institutions like government and the media. Robert Putnam cites the NORC survey findings in his book Bowling Alone as he describes the impact on communities of declining social participation.[5]
The Internet stretches the idea of generalised trust even further. Online, people interact with strangers and form relationships across national boundaries, without the same norms or sanctions that apply offline. Online interactions in a hyperconnected world clearly play a role in the development of social capital, despite the lack of in-person interaction. But there are also unique concerns online regarding privacy, control over data and reputational risk.
Teams and swift trust
In terms of trust at work, different forms apply. Within a team, trust operates between colleagues and between employees and their direct manager. There is a vast literature on high performing teams, which stretches back to the 1950s. But Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith wrote convincingly about The Wisdom of Teams in 1993.[6] For them, effective teams are relatively small, contain people with complementary skills, share a sense of purpose, focus on achieving specific goals, have a clear approach to the way they work, and crucially, team members share a sense of mutual accountability. Two critical success factors are commitment (holding yourself accountable for team goals) and trust (following through on your promises).
It used to be that trusted relationships could be built up over time at the team level, based on recurrent events and reciprocity. One of the most familiar models of team formation is Bruce Tuckman’s model of group development, with four key stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing.[7] The norming stage depends on a successful coming together and a settling down as team members get to know one another. This is when the team becomes focused and productive, with an established way of working together, leading to the performing stage.
However, in today’s more agile, flexible and networked organisations, teams often come together rapidly and need to work together effectively without the time it usually takes to build trust in the norming stage. And this has given rise to the notion of swift trust.
Swift trust refers to the way that rapidly-assembled or temporary teams are able to work together quickly. It’s important because teams are often put together in order to achieve short-term tasks, before being disbanded and re-formed with different team members for a different task. According to Debra Meyerson et al, swift trust requires parties to interact as if trust were present, and then to quickly verify that is actually the case in order to manage vulnerabilities and expectations.[8] As such, swift trust is a form of risk management.
Swift trust assumes that members have little or no choice but to give each other the benefit of the doubt for the success of the group. To build swift trust, the team leader needs to spend time setting things up correctly, for example, by explaining why each person has been selected for the project. In this way they act as a “trust broker”. It’s important for team members to build a great first impression in the earliest days. And other success factors include dealing quickly with any issues as they arise, very frequent and open communications, and quickly celebrating achievements.
Swift trust is critical for virtual teams when there is limited or no time to build interpersonal relationships. And swift trust is especially applicable to discussions about the future of work, where projects may be managed by instantly-formed, diverse and short-lived teams of strangers spread across continents. The may include a mix of workers (employees, contractors, partners, customers) who only ever interact online. The ability to establish an identity, to share a common purpose and to deliver an agreed outcome requires an assumption that trust exists. A key success factor is transparency and openness in the way people work. This is the hallmark of many virtual teams in the technology sector, for example, who openly share all their data and workings, as this means that trust verification can be quick.
Leadership and confidence
The second key form of trust at work operates between the individual and the organisation they work for. This has been the focus of much of the work on employee commitment and engagement, which involves understanding the local and organisational factors that drive employees’ sense of pride, advocacy and discretionary effort.
When it comes to individual-organisation trust in the workplace, there is a strong argument to say that the real focus should be on confidence, rather than trust per se. Confidence is the belief, based on experience or evidence, that certain future events will occur as expected. Confidence means that I believe things will get better, assuming they need to improve, or that they will remain the same if they are already positive. It is future-oriented and it affects the personal and business decisions that I make. This might include, for example, whether I keep an eye open for job opportunities or if I will commit to stretching performance goals.
Two key challenges for leaders in building confidence and demonstrating their trustworthiness are the increasing complicatedness of getting work done, which makes it hard to assess competence, and changes to the traditional elements of jobs and employment, where more risk is falling on the employee side of the equation. In addition, traditional communication routes are breaking down, meaning that new approaches are required to communicate clearly and to cut through the noise. This is especially important from a change leadership perspective and for overcoming the barriers to successful transformation, such as employees’ overall change weariness. Fortunately, there is no shortage of advice for business leaders, which is typically based on survey findings, interviews, anecdote and personal experience:
- The most widely-read business writer on leadership, trust and confidence at work is probably Steven Covey who identifies 13 behaviours that establish trustworthiness: talk straight, demonstrate respect, create transparency, right wrongs, show loyalty, deliver results, get better, confront reality, clarify expectations, practice accountability, listen first, keep commitments, and extend trust (i.e. visibly demonstrate your own propensity to trust others).[9]
- Robert Hurley similarly highlights key leadership facets which affect the trustor’s propensity to trust, such as risk-tolerance, and factors that affect any situation in which trust is required, such as benevolence, capability, communication and integrity.[10]
- Denis and Michelle Reina, in turn, emphasise the importance of character, communication and capability in building trust.[11]
- Of course, a leader’s ability to inspire confidence has long been seen as a critical trait. When Peter Drucker described the rise of the knowledge worker, he highlighted the importance of trust for effective leadership. A key characteristic of an effective leader, according to Drucker, is the ability to Think and Say “We”: “Effective executives know that they have ultimate responsibility, which can be neither shared nor delegated. But they have authority only because they have the trust of the organization. This means that they think of the needs and the opportunities of the organization before they think of their own needs and opportunities.”[12]
- More recently, Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist, has moved beyond survey and interview data to study the release of Oxytocin and its effects on the brain. He highlights factors such as recognition, openness, empowerment and caring in building trust and confidence at work. According to Zak, “The neuromanagement challenge is to design a culture in which oxytocin can be released many times during the day by positive social interactions.”[13]
- And in terms of the future of work, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers have argued that in the most successful companies in the digital age, there is a need to establish “extreme trust” which goes well beyond simple trustworthiness. As technology generates more and more transparency in the way people work and in the way they interact with their customers, those customers and consumers, as well as employees, will hold businesses to higher and higher standards. For Peppers and Rogers this requires a step change in openness and communication in order to demonstrate “honest competence”.[14]
Cooperation and other benefits of trust and confidence
As well as being critical to a positive employee experience, trust and confidence are seen to have performance benefits for organisations and teams.
At the organisational level, Fukuyama argues that there is a significant economic benefit to trust, which is directly the result of culture. For Fukyama, the most effective organisations operate like a network and “can save on transaction costs substantially if their members follow an informal set of rules that require little or no overhead to negotiate, adjudicate and enforce”.
This is a link that others have explored. For example, Paul Zak and Stephen Knack used data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to show how higher trust at a country level is related to increased investment and economic growth.[15] La Porta et al also used WVS data to explore the impact of trust on the performance of large firms.[16] And Marc Goergen et al used macro-level data and comparative firm-level evidence to show how country trust and firm-level trust have a positive impact on financial performance.[17]
At a team level, the key performance benefit from trust and confidence at work is improved cooperation. In 2016 Bart de Jong et al published a meta-analysis examining the relationship between trust and team performance. Their paper looked at data from 112 studies, representing almost 8,000 teams and they found that intra-team trust is positively related to team performance. They found that this relationship holds after controlling for a team’s specific level of trust in their leader and also for past team performance, although the relationship is contingent upon the level of task interdependence, authority differentiation, and skill differentiation in teams.[18]
A similar conclusion was reached by Sarah Brown et al who used the 2004 and 2011 Work Place and Employee Relations Surveys (WERS) to analyse the role of employee trust in influencing workplace performance in both pre- and post-recessionary periods. Their findings showed a positive relationship between three measures of workplace performance (financial performance, labour productivity and product or service quality) and employee trust at both points in time.[19]
At a team level, therefore, trust helps people to focus on collective goals rather than their own narrow interests. In high-trust teams employees are more likely to openly share perspectives and to work through differences, improving collaboration and work quality. While in low-trust teams people are more likely to spend time worrying about the need to defend their own personal positions and interests.
And in terms of the future of work, Christina Breuer et al have looked specifically at the impact of trust on the effectiveness of virtual teams. They looked across the findings from 52 studies, representing 12,615 individuals in 1,850 teams, and they confirmed the positive overall relationship between team trust and team effectiveness. But they also found that the relationship between team trust and team performance was even stronger in virtual teams. Hence, the ability to establish swift trust in virtual teams has an even more important impact on the performance of those teams.[20]
A recap of key terms:
There is an array of approaches to defining and measuring trust, and to understanding the importance of forms of trust in different settings.
In terms of some of the key concepts and definitions that are related to trust at work, and especially the trends associated with the future of work:
- Trust at work: Is the willingness of employees to rely on their colleagues, their manager and leaders. It depends on a degree of vulnerability from the trustor and an assessment of the competence, integrity and benevolence of their colleagues, manager and employer. Trust is not static and it will fluctuate over time.
- Team-level swift trust: For rapidly-assembled teams and virtual teams, it’s critical to establish swift trust. This depends on an assumption of trust and then the quick verification of trust through open and frequent communication.
- Leadership and confidence: At an organisational level, leaders need to build confidence in the future as well as demonstrate their honest competence through open communication. They also need to demonstrate their own propensity to trust others.
- Trust, confidence and cooperation: The main performance benefit of trust at work is more effective teamwork and improved collaboration. Both are key success factors for organisations in the future of work.
Note:
This piece is basically a literature review for a book on trust at work. I don’t want a long review in the book, so this will be cut right down and included in a small side bar. But I did want a longer piece online that I can link to.
Any errors are all my own.
References:
[1] Hardin, Russell. Trust. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
[2] Fukuyama, Francis. Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. Free Press Paperbacks, 1995.
[3] Schoorman, F. David, Roger C. Mayer, and James H. Davis. “An integrative model of organizational trust: Past, present, and future.” Academy of Management Review 32.2 (2007): 344–354.
[4] Dixit and Nalebuff, “Prisoners’ Dilemma.” The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Library of Economics and Liberty, 2008)
[5] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster, 2001.
[6] Katzenbach, Jon R., and Douglas K. Smith. The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. Harvard Business Press, 1993.
[7] Tuckman, Bruce W. “Developmental sequence in small groups.” Psychological bulletin 63.6 (1965).
[8] Meyerson, Debra, Karl E. Weick, and Roderick M. Kramer. “Swift trust and temporary groups.” Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research 166 (1996).
[9] Covey, Stephen MR. The speed of trust: The one thing that changes everything. Simon and Schuster, 2006.
[10] Hurley, Robert F. The decision to trust: How leaders create high-trust organizations. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
[11] Reina, Dennis S., and Michelle L. Reina. Trust & betrayal in the workplace: Building effective relationships in your organization. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006.
[12] Drucker, Peter. What Makes an Effective Executive (Harvard Business Review Classics). Harvard Business Review Press, 2017.
[13] Zak, Paul J. “The neuroscience of trust.” Harvard Business Review, January–February (2017).
[14] Peppers, Don, and Martha Rogers. Extreme trust: Honesty as a competitive advantage. Penguin, 2016.
[15] Zak, Paul J., and Stephen Knack. “Trust and growth.” The economic journal 111.470 (2001): 295–321.
[16] Shleifer, A., La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F., & Vishny, R. W. (1997). Trust in large organizations. Am Econ Rev, 87(2), 333–338.
[17] Goergen, Marc, et al. “Trust, owner rights, employee rights and firm performance.” Journal of Business Finance & Accounting 40.5–6 (2013): 589–619.
[18] De Jong, Bart A., Kurt T. Dirks, and Nicole Gillespie. “Trust and team performance: A meta-analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates.” Journal of Applied Psychology 101.8 (2016).
[19] Brown, Sarah, et al. “Employee trust and workplace performance.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 116 (2015): 361–378.
[20] Breuer, Christina, Joachim Hüffmeier, and Guido Hertel. “Does trust matter more in virtual teams? A meta-analysis of trust and team effectiveness considering virtuality and documentation as moderators.” (2016).
