Building Trust in the Workplace
Workplace dynamics make a significant difference to people and the organizations they sustain. High-performance organizations earn, develop, and retain trust for superior results.
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Building Trust in the Workplace
In a Word Workplace dynamics make a significant difference to people and the organizations they sustain. High-performance organizations earn, develop, and retain trust for superior results.
Introduction Dictionary.com’s first definition of trust is “reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence”. The website prompts also that it is “the obligation or responsibility imposed on a person in whom confidence or authority is placed: a position of trust”. Both definitions imply that trust is a relationship of reliance1: indeed, a relationship without trust is no relationship at all. Trust is therefore both an emotional2 and a rational3 (cognitive, calculative, and rational) act. The emotions associated with it include affection, gratitude, security,
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To be exact, trust is a prediction of reliance, derived from what a party knows about another. The act of trusting exposes one’s vulnerabilities to others in the belief that they will not take advantage of these. 3 The act of trusting involves assessing probabilities of profit and loss, calculating expected utility based on (past, current, and expected) performance, and concluding that the party in question will behave in a predictable manner. 2
© Asian Development Bank 2017 O. Serrat, Knowledge Solutions, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0983-9_69
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Building Trust in the Workplace
confidence, acceptance, interest, admiration, respect, liking, appreciation, contentment, and satisfaction, all of them necessary ingredients of psychological health. The logic of it is grounded in assessments of a party’s dependability, which play a significant role in decisions to trust. As expected, there are different intensities to trust, depending on why one grants trust and why it is accepted4: knowing the different types of trust informs decision-making at each level.5 Strangely, however, despite instinctive recognition of the importance of trust in human affairs, its conceptualization in the workplace remains limited in the literature—but grew in the 1990s, while actions to foster it in that environment are still not readily discernible in practice.
Benefits In organizations, business processes6—be they management, operational, or supporting processes—are conducted via relationships. Since trust among interacting parties is the foundation of effective relationships, it stands to reason that organizations can reap benefits from strengthening it. As a matter of fact, high-trust environments correlate positively with high degrees of personnel involvement, commitment, and organizational success. Decided advantages include increased value; accelerated growth; market and societal trust; reputation and recognizable
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Kramer (1999) has identified six kinds of trust. Dispositional trust refers to an individual’s predisposition to trust; it is based on experiences with relationships and the outlook on human nature that then guides decisions. History-based trust relies on the build up of interactions over time; expectati
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