What makes employees trust their organisation?

An organisation has tried to become more open so the leaders have been holding regular Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions. Decisions are also being explained to employees more clearly and they are being encouraged to challenge them, yet employees seem cautious. They listen to what the leadership is saying but when an important decision is about to be made, the response is still one of doubt. 

Such a gap between leadership transparency and employee caution can exist in modern workplaces. In their review of 25 years of workplace trust research, Dirks and de Jong (2022) describe trust as involving expectations about the other’s future actions. 

In the example, open communication may reduce ambiguity but still it doesn’t automatically build trust. But why not? Maybe because sometimes trust becomes treated as something that organisations can ask their employees to feel. It perhaps isn’t asked explicitly, but there are expectations like: we are being open with you, therefore you should trust us. However, this isn’t how things work, right? The point of openness is to give employees information but they are going to be the ones deciding what that information means to them about their organisation. 

Trust involves being willing to rely on another when there’s something important at stake and employees gauge whether their organisation appears trustworthy to them (Mayer et al., 1995). This trustworthiness is often understood conceptually through perceived ability, benevolence and integrity. 

Here’s how Searle et al. (2011) describe these ideas at the organisational level:

  • Ability: whether the organisation can actually do what is expected of it
  • Benevolence: whether the organisation appears to care about the interests of its employees
  • Integrity: whether the organisation consistently follows principles that employees see as acceptable

Employees repeatedly see how decisions are made, how performance is managed, how outcomes are handled, what the organisation really does after making commitments and so much more. Such experiences give them information about the kind of organisation they work in and rely on (Searle et al., 2011). 

Searle et al. (2011) found that trust in the employer was related to High Involvement Work Practices (HIWPs) and procedural justice. But there’s more to this! Cohen-Charash and Spector (2001) found that trust in an organisation and management was similarly related to distributive and interactional justice as well, so fairness shouldn’t be reduced to procedure alone. Behavioural integrity is about whether words and actions align, including whether promises are kept and stated values are enacted (Simons et al., 2022).  

Hence, employees aren’t evaluating one AMA or a message. They interpret a pattern.

Now to answer the question, employees are more likely to trust their organisation when what they repeatedly experience gives them a reason to see it as capable, caring and principled. This can happen when decisions feel fair and when what the organisation says is consistent with what it actually does. Even with all this, there’s no formula for trust.

In the example at the start, the AMAs may not have been wrong. They might just represent new evidence that conflicts with the expectations employees have already formed. It’s possible that employees have seen others being treated unfairly or decisions being made inconsistently. In such cases, one new openness initiative might not immediately change what they expect from their organisation. 

Trust can take time to build but it can be damaged fast and even attempts to repair it may  not always restore it completely (Kähkönen et al., 2021).

References

Cohen-Charash, Y., & Spector, P. E. (2001). The Role of Justice in Organizations: A Meta-Analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 86(2), 278–321. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.2001.2958

Dirks, K. T., & de Jong, B. (2022). Trust within the Workplace: A review of two waves of research and a glimpse of the third. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9(1), 247–276. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012420-083025

Kähkönen, T., Blomqvist, K., Gillespie, N., & Vanhala, M. (2021). Employee trust repair: A systematic review of 20 years of empirical research and future research directions. Journal of Business Research, 130, 98–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.03.019

Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., Schoorman, F. D., University of Notre Dame, & Purdue University. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. In The Academy of Management Review (Vols. 20–20, Issue 3, pp. 709–734). https://www.jstor.org/stable/258792

Searle, R., Hartog, D. N. D., Weibel, A., Gillespie, N., Six, F., Hatzakis, T., & Skinner, D. (2011). Trust in the employer: the role of high-involvement work practices and procedural justice in European organizations. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 22(5), 1069–1092. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2011.556782

Simons, T., Leroy, H., & Nishii, L. (2022). Revisiting Behavioral Integrity: Progress and new directions after 20 years. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9(1), 365–389. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012420-062016