Trust
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The Outcomes of Trust
• Trust between supervisors and employees has several
specific advantages:
• Trust encourages taking risks.
• Whenever leaders and employees decide to deviate from
the usual way of doing things, or to take their supervisor’s,
word on a new direction, they are taking a risk. In both
cases, a trusting relationship can facilitate that leap.
© Pearson Education Limited, 2024
The Outcomes of Trust
• Trust facilitates information sharing.
• One big reason employees fail to express concerns at work
is that they do not feel psychologically safe revealing their
views.
• When managers demonstrate that they will give employees’
ideas a fair hearing and actively make changes, employees
are more willing to speak out.
© Pearson Education Limited, 2024
The Outcomes of Trust
• Trusting teams are more effective.
• When a leader sets a trusting tone in a team, members are more
willing to help each other and exert extra effort, which increases
trust.
• Members of mistrusting teams tend to be suspicious of each
other, constantly guard against exploitation, and restrict
communication with others in the group. These actions tend to
undermine and can eventually destroy the group.
© Pearson Education Limited, 2024
The Outcomes of Trust
• Trust enhances productivity.
• The bottom-line interest of companies appears to be
positively influenced by trust.
• Employees who trust their supervisors tend to receive
higher performance ratings, indicating higher productivity.
• People respond to mistrust by concealing information and
secretly pursuing their own interests.
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The Nature of Trust
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Trust Development
• What key characteristics lead us to believe a leader is
trustworthy?
• Evidence has identified three: integrity, benevolence, and ability
• Integrity refers to honesty and truthfulness.
• When 570 white-collar employees were given a list of twenty-
eight attributes related to leadership, they rated the most
important by far.
• Integrity also means maintaining consistency between what you
do and say (e.g., authenticity).
© Pearson Education Limited, 2024
Trust Development
• Benevolence means the trusted person has your interests at
heart, even if your interests are not necessarily in line with their
interests.
• Caring and supportive behavior is part of the emotional bond
between leaders and followers.
• Ability encompasses an individual’s technical and interpersonal
knowledge and skills.
• You are unlikely to depend on someone whose abilities you do
not believe in even if the person is highly principled and has the
best intentions.
© Pearson Education Limited, 2024
Trust Propensity
• Trust propensity refers to how likely an employee is to trust a
leader.
• Some people are simply more likely to believe others can be
trusted.
• When teams are composed of members with different
propensities to trust leaders or other team members, they are
more prone to spiral downwardly when conflict arises.
• Certainty matters as well—when employees are certain that a
leader is trustworthy (e.g., the leader has everything to lose by
being untrustworthy) they have a higher propensity to trust that
leader.
© Pearson Education Limited, 2024
