Trust is the foundation of relationships at the workplace. Developing trust in the workforce leads to improved teamwork and collaboration, lower resistance to change as well as honest and ethical decisions. Trusted relationships at the workplace develop over time and are usually impacted by individual characteristics of being trustworthy & trusting and is enabled by a climate of trust which is created by the organization’s culture.

A bird’s eye view on the relationship between trust and organizational performance usually covers the employees’ trust in the organization and an organizations leadership. However, we now build a case for shifting the focus of trust from “trust in management” to “being trusted by the management”.

The ability to predict and manage employee behaviour is critical to improving organizational effectiveness. To date, extensive research has been done around employees’ collective perceptions of trust in the management and its influence on performance of the organization. This led to a bundle of organizational practices like open houses, regular updates on organization direction, direct connections with the leadership etc., that signal or create a positive perception of the management amongst the workforce. According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer (Edelman, 2019), 71% of employees who trust their employer are more likely to be engaged in their work which in turn leads to better performance of the individual and collectively for the organization.

Being trusted by the management

Salmon & Robinson, coined the term “collective felt trust”. Defined as a “shared group-level cognition”, collective felt trust comes into play when employees working together in the same organization come to agree on the extent to which they are trusted by management”. Collective felt trust addresses the relationship between an employees’ global perception of the organization. Individuals’ perception of an environment leads to social judgements about the appropriate behavior and the norms appropriate to this kind of social environment. Based on this, collective felt trust is likely to be impacted by systems implemented in the organization and the signals they give consistently.

So how can organizations convey their trust in employees?

Managers have an important role to play over here. They are the last mile connect with the workforce and the manner in which they communicate and deliver some of the organizations policies have a direct bearing on building a feeling that management trusts its employees. Having said that, managers also have their own styles of dealing and communicating with their team – which sometimes creates a contrary perception.

The employees’ perception of being trusted is conveyed through clear communication by the managers in the organization. Through open communication, direct feedbacks, rewards, enabling decision-making and delegating critical tasks, managers successfully communicate their trust in employees. Alternatively, using gestures such as implementing organization-wide practice of no surveillance systems or monitoring of timings and uniform rules for all employees implies a climate of trust in employees.

What happens when the employees perceive that they are trusted by management?

The employees’ perception of being trusted can effectively help the organizations shift from focusing on governance and supervision to one of self-managed autonomous teams resulting in higher performance, faster decision making and collaborative cross functional working. The perception of being trusted induces moral considerations in employees and builds a psychological contract with the employees based on trust. When this is created, employees raise their level of responsibilities and ownership while taking decisions. Employees ask themselves – Is this the right thing to do – due to psychological contract and guilt consciousness. When environmental cues lead employees to believe that they are trusted by the management, they develop higher responsibility norms and a sense of accountability towards the organizations. Raised responsibility norms encourage a shared belief in employees that their behavior should advance the goals of the organization. Collective felt trust encourages employees to act in accordance with expectations by their Managers and engage in productive, ‘taking charge’ behaviors.

What does it mean for the organization?

The presence of micromanagement in the organization is often detrimental for the manager and employee outcomes as it creates a controlled business environment for the employees. The perception of being trusted by the management allows employees to be more autonomous in their working promoting maximum execution and minimal governance in the workplace. At an organizational level, the shift of focus towards managers’ trust in employees result in the reduction of micromanagement costs. It frees up the managerial bandwidth which is then directed towards critical business challenges and taking timely decisions. Additionally, research (Brower et al., 2009) in the area of trust highlights that the employees’ perception of being trusted by the management is positively related to organizational citizenship behavior.

Moving towards maximum execution and minimum governance

Workplaces are becoming virtual; teams are distributed and work is getting done through collaboration with cross functional teams. With such dynamism in the business environment, monitoring and supervision can become quite costly and choke the managerial bandwidth. Team must become autonomous and self-managed to solve some of the key business challenges. Previous blog talks about benefits of autonomous teams

Some of the key steps in building self-managed teams include:

• Scoping work that is challenging
• Equipping the teams with resources
• Empowering to take decisions
• Upskilling team members in working in a self-managed work environment
• Building reflection skills in team members to analyze their own performance and form a psychological contract for raising performance standards

At Kognoz, our research has found that “being trusted by the management” yields greater results than trust in management. Through our research we have found that management’s trust in employees is a significant predictor of employee performance and creates an environment where employees go beyond their call of duty to meet common and shared organizational goals.

With organizations’ inclination towards agility, a shift towards employees’ perception of being trusted will allow autonomy in the workplace enabling employee empowerment and improved innovation in the teams.

How is your organization trusting the workforce?

References
Salamon, S. D., & Robinson, S. L. (2008). Trust that binds: The impact of collective felt trust on organizational performance. Journal of applied Psychology, 93(3), 593.

Brower, H. H., Lester, S. W., Korsgaard, M. A., & Dineen, B. R. (2009). A closer look at trust between managers and subordinates: Understanding the effects of both trusting and being trusted on subordinate outcomes. Journal of management, 35(2), 327-347.

Edelman. (2019). Edelman Trust Barometer. https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2019-02/2019_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Executive_Summary.pdf