Trust process
...r transactions. In the attempt to create conditions for process trust to develop, in trust sensitive management, control by hierarchical or legal coercion, or incentives and dependence, can be destructive. In terms of the psychological anchoring and adjustment heuristic discussed before, mistrust may become the anchor, from which only small adjustments are made even when observed behaviour is manifestly cooperative. People may start on the basis of affect, as in a family firm or a partnership between friends, and become calculative later. That may destroy trust, but it can also deepen it. Trust has many aspects of behaviour, as there are causes of things going wrong. One can have trust in a partner’s competence, his dedication, his benevolence, his honesty and the availability of means or external conditions. One may observe that external conditions rather than a partner’s behaviour were the cause of disappointing outcomes. It is possible that this cannot be seen, but is claimed by the partner as an explanation. People have a natural inclination to judge – to evaluate actions and attribute attitudes or motives to people – and here we often jump to conclusions. Such evaluations are subject to the decision heuristics discussed before. We may be swayed by vivid experiences, in the availability heuristic, by the representative heuristic and by the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. The joint solution of conflict can enhance and deepen trust, in several ways. One way is that it yields learning, as just indicated, which confirms the value of the relation and thereby increases mutual commitment. Another way is that a problem is solved by itself, reducing perceived risk in the relation. In view of this potential self-reinforcing dynamic of trust and suspicion, honesty and trust in honesty are crucial. Honesty here is openness: giving appropriate, truthful and timely information. Dishonesty is the withholding or distortion of appropriate information. Honesty and trust reinforce each other, as suspicion and dishonesty do. Honesty helps to deal with deviant phenomena without narrowing tolerance levels and without reducing perceived limits of trustworthiness. It may event widen both and thereby deepen trust. When there is no intentional trust, one may be afraid to be honest, less the partner misuses information of opportunistic purposes or to relax the level of his dedication. When the other party perceives that he is receiving neither trust nor information, he may reciprocate with dishonesty. When a disaster is foreseen, one is tempted to keep it secret. This should be resisted. Here is a chance to win trust by announcing the problem before it becomes manifest, asking for help and engaging in a joint effort to redress or mitigate disaster. There is also a subtle reason for dishonesty that is benevolent. One may withhold criticism out of fear of (further) reducing a partner’s self-confidence. A special problem here lies in the situation where collaboration has to develop between partners who are unequal in their dependence on each other. The most dependent partner may be suspicious because of the one –sided risk he runs, so he starts the relation on the basis of mistrust or apprehension and is on the lookout for signs of opportunistic exploitation of his dependence. His perceived limit of trustworthiness and his tolerance level are narrow. One may go further, not just withholding criticism, but also offering compliments. Compliments, both private and public, especially to new staff, can play a role as an explicit act of policy, in trust-sensitive management. The compliments serve to build trust in to ways. First, they increase self-confidence of new staff and his helps them to grant trust, but not excessive trust, to others. Second, it enhances the trust that others have in the new colleague. Empty compliments have an adverse effect. Trust is more complex phenomenon. There are limits to trust. Trust is situation-specific and person-specific. Blind trust is naïve. Therefore there are valid reasons and occasions for distrust. The behavioural content of trust is the undertaking of a risky course of action on the confident expectation that all persons involved in the action will act competently and dutifully. Behavioural displays of trust-implying actions help to create the cognitive platform of trust and help to establish or reinforce the emotional sentiment of trust. Ethics is the acceptability of the trustee’s set of values and principles. Since it is rare for two individuals to have complete value-congruence, occasions for violations of trust, that is, trouble, exist whenever we find the other’s principles unacceptable. What actions are effective when one wants consciously built trust? Building on Zand (1972, 1997), we identify the following key actions: Information: disclose information in an accurate and timely fashion, give both positive and negative feedback; Influence: initiate and accept changes to your decisions, seek and accept the counsel of other people; Control: make yourself dependent on the other person, delegate tasks, give responsibility to other people. The models at the end of the previous section describe the development and deepening of trust over time through positive experiences. The trust experience is not necessarily always positive. There are limits to trust. Since the world is unpredictable and people do not always behave rationally, unexpected events or surprises are inevitable. Hence an unpleasant surprise, or trouble, is inevitable. We define trouble as the disruption of the flow of expectations, which is experienced as unpleased. Thus both trust and trouble deal with patterns of expectations. With trust, the pattern is disrupted. Dealing with trouble is something we would rather avoid. Three basic human tendencies are those towards consistency or balance, attribution and evaluation. Yet the way to deal effectively with trouble requires us to do the opposite: to suspend our judgment and attributions and inquire into the causes of the troubling experience, for example, a mishap, a misunderstanding, a disagreement, incompetence or malicious intent. Only some of these causes need lead to distrust. Distrust only emerges when the suspicion arises that the disruption of expectations in one exchange is likely to generalize to other transactions. To distrust, then, implies an attribution of intentionality that continues throughout all interactions or exchanges, at least of a particular type. It is the dynamic interplay between trust and trouble that ultimately determines the quality of a particular relationship and its effectiveness, or the degree to which it is sustainable and generative. One possible ground for relationship rupture, apart from the trouble that triggered this process, is that one of the parties involved behaved in a way that signaled loss of interest in the relationship. Distrust need not always lead to relationship rupture. It can very well lead to relationship recalibration. This will be case, for example, if the party who is seen as behaving in a untrustworthy manner has shown lack of competence, but good benevolence, dedication and integrity. The categories used for the quality of the relationship (adapted from Lewicki and Bunker, 1996) are as follows: Relationship is deepened; Relationship is restored to previous level, or the event has no impact; Relationship is recalibrated downwards, only for the specific dimension of trustworthiness involved; Relationship is ruptured. Severe trouble can trigger a process that can lead to a deepening of the trust provided that both players use voice and act in a constructive manner towards each other, signaling that they want to continue the relationship. WHY IS TRUST IN ORGANIZATIONS IMPORTANT? The problem of coordinating individual actor’s activities within the boundaries of the organization is certainly one of the key issues of organizational theory. Irrespective of whether the nature of the organization is seen as primarily based on contractual arrangements, shared social norms, constellations of economic interests or common cultural orientations, the question of how to integrate different actor’s expectations and interaction lies at the heart of any organization’s identity. Given this inherent characteristic of trust, it seems evident that social actors who consider this mechanism as a possible basis for their interaction with another actor usually seek reasons as to why the risk of trust will at least not exceed certain – more or less acceptable – limits. Although trust can never be built on complete information, since it would make itself superfluous in this case, sensible trustors are, by the same token, not keen to invest ‘blind trust’. Potential trustors usually try to assess roughly the risk that they would buy into with their decision to invest trust in a relationship and then decide whether or not they are prepared to bear this risk. Social actors tend to make limited investments of trust. Trust does not occur spontaneously inside organizations but is linked to individual and collective learning. It arises out of the need to determine whether mutual expectations regarding trust are fulfilled and is the outcome of direct interactions between the actors involved in the process. Trust is inherently linked to a process of risk taking, because learning is costly and uncertain and its success cannot be guaranteed a priori. Trust may be an important ingredient in any attempt to stabilize mutual expectations. It can also generate positive feedback and interpretations in a context of uncertainty as long as the individuals or organization in question are able to provide reliable and fair signals or organizational procedures. Trust is also crucial to this process because the context is one of bounded rationality, where the contracts between the employers and the employees are in complete and where the nature of industrial relations and the space for cooperation offer different courses of action for each of the actors involved. The central function of the rules implied in the structural inventory of the organization is to provide shared social and cultural meaning. This produces a world-in-common which building trust and play important role in organizations. Where the structural inventory of an organization is stable and reliable, its individual members are more likely to find good reasons to believe that the risk of investing trust in their relationships with other actors of the same organization is relatively low. A strong internal regulation of the organization will reduce the inherent risk of trust considerably. The following three basic features of the phenomenon of trust are: Trust deals with the problem of predicting another social actor’s future behaviour. It is legitimate and most likely that a potential trustor will seen possibilities to reduce the risk he needs to bear when investing trust. Apart from the potential trustee’s goodwill and abilities to perform according to the potential trustor’s expectations, the institutional framework in which the possible relationship between the two parties will be embedded is very important with regard to whether the trustor will decide to invest trust or to refrain from doing so. The theoretical literature on trust makes an important distinction between two fundamental forms of trust: personal trust and impersonal trust. Three forms of trust: Personal trust; System trust; Institutional trust. The concept of personal trust comes closet to the ordinary language connotations of trust. It can be fostered by frequently using opportunities to have face-to-face contacts between individual actors. The usual proximity of workplaces within organizations can be seen as a seedbed for developing this form of trust. Within organizations the problem with this form of trust is that it takes a lot of time to grow. In many cases it is as such not sufficient to coordinate effectively expectations and interaction between individuals, especially not in large and complex organizations. System trust is a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in anthropological conditions of human behaviour. System trust that exists within organizations builds on the authority attributed to formal social positions as well as on the reliability of technical systems, standards and procedures. One of the most interesting phenomena associated with this form of trust is that, one in a while, some representatives of the systemic abstract authorities whose activities are, in normal circumstances, largely withdrawn from their clients’, customers’, or workforce’s awareness become touchable. The purpose of this is to reassure these individuals that their trust is placed in responsible social actors who are actually in control of the systems they stand for. This is why pilots occasionally speak to their passengers, eloquent nuclear scientists appear in TV talk shows and powerful entrepreneurs as well as high-ranking managers of large corporations suddenly become equal to the lowest-paid cleaner in their organization when sitting next to him on the occasion of a Christmas party. In all these situations individuals lend a personal flavour to the unknowing abstract worlds of superior knowledge and power, confirming that these deserve to be trusted. Without these boundary-spanning roles being competently performed on suitable occasions, it would be doubtful that these abstract authoritative and technical systems could – at least in the longer run – be a powerful source of trust. Institut...