Trust at Work: Broken Promises and the Manager's Mirror

In our last post we introduced insights on trust in organisations from the symposium run by the Centre for Trust and Ethical Behaviour. We learned that surface features such as organisational prestige and size, as well as historical features such as your own experience or the organisations track record, influence how we look at organisations from the outside.


In this post, we continue by looking at how trust – or lack of trust – endures even in the face of contradictory events. And we see the particular importance of one person in shaping our trust in the organisation: our manager.

Michelle McGrath's presentation explored promises made and broken in the workplace. Her work focuses on the psychological contract – the unwritten contract between the workplace and an employee that they carry with them and use to view their working existence. One person may see their arrangement with the employer as a principally transactional one, where I do A in order to receive B. Another believes they are entering into a relationship with the employer, treating the situation as one based around a strong bond and mutual trust.

McGrath interviewed 30 people using a Critical Incident technique to identify and delve deeply into situations where they felt the employer had broken or exceeded a promise. Each participant was also categorised with respect to their psychological contract. Those with a relational contract treated over-delivery of a promise as a positive example of how the organisation valued them. And they were forgiving of promise-breaking too, rationalising it as situational rather than reflective of the organisation's agenda.

Those with a transactional contract, meanwhile, were unimpressed when a promise was exceeded. In their eyes, it just showed that the organisation was erratic, and they felt that 'anything good that happens is always short-lived.' Interestingly, this resigned attitude also extended to promise breaking: it was annoying but 'what else would you expect?' To an extent, the meaning of the contract overrode the events themselves, with participants continuing to see the employer through the same lens.

One caveat to this work is that the sample didn't contain extreme examples of promise-breaking, nor highly disaffected employees. After all, we know that when a relational contract is damaged sufficiently it can cause serious problems. The metaphor that comes to mind is that of a well-filled tyre on a fast car: encountering one or two pebbles on the road won't interfere with things - but a patch of broken glass is still a disaster in the making…

Attitude to managers account for 35%  per cent of the variance in organisational trust, making Alison LeGood's presentation on the topic highly relevant. Her evidence suggests that in some way we treat the strengths and failings of our managers as a mirror of how the organisation at large behaves, meaning that we take an ethical manager to imply an ethical organisation. This was demonstrated within a study that asked individuals to rate their managers - 201 within mid to senior level positions - on behaviours that fell across three areas:

* Integrity, including behavioural consistency
* Ability, such as demonstrating and delegating control
* Benevolence, such as open communication and delegating concerns

Individuals also rated different facets of trust in the organisation, which turned out to correlate with relevant behaviours of the manager: for instance, believing that your manager shows open communications makes it more likely you trust the organisation as a whole to be benevolent. For the Integrity and Ability factors, the relationship was stronger for more senior managers. But across every level Benevolent manager behaviour was associated with perceptions of a kinder workplace.

Whether employees assume their manager truly reflects the organisation's agenda, or are simply using them as a proxy to offer some information to navigate the complexities of organisational life, our managers are tied to whether we trust our workplaces.

The symposium provided a multi-faceted look at trust in organisations, that I hope these write-ups demonstrate. It alerts us to structural features of how an organisation is (size, prestige) and how it operates (communications, history) all shape the ‘outsider’s eye.’ It emphasises the power of developing relational psychological contracts, sturdy enough to absorb the occasional disappointment.  It reminds us that individual tendencies to trust are important, but the behaviour we see in the organisation – especially from our managers – is even more so. Some trust comes for free, but more is earned, and all must be kept.

It's About Trust: Expectations & Interactions

Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback. These were the closing words of a fascinating symposium dubbed "The How, Why & For Whom of Organisational Level Trust," introducing research from Coventry University’s Centre for Trust and Ethical Behaviour. We’re covering the symposium in this post and another later this week.

Trusting someone means you are prepared to let yourself be in a place of vulnerability, in the belief that the other person will not let you down. Low trust is associated with a range of organisational problems, such as low motivation, low commitment, and cynicism, as well as intention to leave. And higher trust has active benefits - in an article freely available online, it is shown to be associated with putting in extra effort in the form of organisational citizenship behaviours such as helping others or speaking out about improvements, and ultimately in better organisational performance. Trust matters. So how do organisations become trusted?

The symposium kicked off with Prof Rosalind Searle’s talk exploring what draws a new hire to put more trust in their new workplace - for example, when they perceive the organisation as prestigious. To my surprise, those joining a smaller organisation were less trusting. Granted, it can be reassuring to know that your employer is well-established, hopefully with mechanisms and policies developed over time to give you some protection. But Searle’s claim also suggests smaller workplaces aren't fully capitalising on their more intimate scale and personal familiarity. Further research is needed to identify the specifics of what is dampening trust here.

There is another crucial factor that influences our general trust in a workplace, and that is our 'propensity to trust:' an enduring trait reflecting the stable component of how trusting we are across contexts. While this is something that organisations can’t directly influence, it can be useful to understand the impact of low propensity to trust, especially if your recruitment for a role may lean towards someone with that trait.

Searle also took us through another way we relate to organisations: as a consumer or service user. In this role, we have to take even more on trust than as an organisational insider. For instance, most of us don't scrutinise the food sourcing practices of our supermarkets, we just trust that their meat is what they say it is. When that trust is lost, it can have substantial consequences.

Evidence suggests many factors influence consumer trust globally, differing from region to region. For example, endorsements from other users are crucial in Asia, whereas relationship history - how you personally have been treated to date - matters as much or more to US and European consumers.  It’s possible this could dovetail with the collective-individualistic differences between cultures, which we know influence some consumer behaviours such as complaints. Meanwhile, transparent communications - such as breaking bad news stories or sharing details of internal workings such as mergers -  is particularly important in business-to-business contexts.

Our surface interactions with organisations, then, are shaped by certain expectations and information sources, as are our attitudes to them as a new entrant. But once we are part of the organisation, how is trust earned and maintained? Check in later this week for our second report.

Your boss's expectations shape your performance - but only if you trust them?

The Pygmalion effect is the much-observed finding that a leader's high expectations for their subordinates, if clearly communicated and followed up by supporting behaviours, translate into higher achievements for those subordinates. The leader paints the possibility of another possible self that the subordinate could become - 'be all you can be' - if they apply themselves and follow the path. Thus inspired, the subordinate fixes themself on the new horizon, and with guidance, surpasses themself. The leader keeps the horizon visible, a function termed 'the maintenance of hope'. As you can see, the orthodox view of this is rather unidirectional - leader transmits, others receive. In a theoretical paper, Leonard Kararkowsky, Nadia DeGama and Kenneth McBey unpack how the subordinate is likely to be a crucial factor in this effect: for them, it all comes down to trust.

Trust involves at its base a willingness to be vulnerable and put yourself in anothers hands, believing they will not let you down. Clearly the Pygmalion effect involves risk, as it calls for individuals to abandon old behaviours and strive for something currently beyond them. So it's reasonable to believe trust plays a part. Just how might it do so?

Firstly, the authors note that for trust to occur, the individual has to believe that the trustee has the ability to deliver. This is a cool, cognitive component of trust. Does this leader have the nous to get me from the present to the new possibility? And even before this, do I believe they possess good enough judgment to spot talent? If this trust is present, then the manager's high expectations can raise the subordinate's self-expectations, and with it self-efficacy and motivation to perform.

Just because they can, doesn't mean they will. So trust also relates to beliefs about a person's integrity: how reliable they are, whether their words meet their actions. Coupled with this is an even more important factor: benevolence. While integrity and capability are concerns to coolly appraise, benevolence involves emotional feelings of loyalty and attachment, the sense that this individual cares for you and will go beyond obligations to see you right. When leader Pygmalion behaviours - goal setting, feedback, advice - are viewed through the prism of integrity and benevolence, the subordinate can view them as one side of a social contract, where the leader is delivering effort (integrity) for the subordinate's good (benevolence). This calls for reciprocity from the subordinate, in the form of renewed efforts and changes in their own behaviour.

Karakowsky and colleagues note that the effect has been most deeply researched in educational and military settings - settings where respect for the other's authority and integrity is taken for granted.  The military setting in particular is heavily masculine, which may explain why the research often fails to find the effect with female leaders, who may be perceived through social stereotyping as less capable due to misfit to masculine activities. The authors conclude that for Pygmalion to be fully understood, we need to understand the influence of trust and the active role that subordinates need to take for change to occur.

Karakowsky, L., DeGama, N., & McBey, K. (2012). Facilitating the Pygmalion effect: The overlooked role of subordinate perceptions of the leader Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 85 (4), 579-599 DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02056.x

Further reading:

White, S. S., & Locke, E. A. (2000). Problems with the Pygmalion effect and some proposed solutions. The Leadership Quarterly, 11, 389–415. DOI: 10.1016/S1048-9843(00)00046-1 

Self-serving leaders levy an emotional toll on those who aren't getting their dues

How does it feel to work under a self-serving leader? We know how horrendous the extremes can be - dictators or fraudulent CEOs can quickly wreck lives - but more commonly the problem is likely to be bad feeling owing to uncertainty about where you stand. That's the conclusion of research from the University of Leuven, Belgium, which also suggests that people find it easier to make peace with these situations when they feel they are getting their personal dues.

Jeroen Camps, Stijn Decoster, and Jeroen Stouten developed and validated a Self-Serving Leadership Scale, involving just those behaviours that involve advancing the leader's own interests, rather than other toxic qualities such as abusive behaviour. This was given to 134 employed participants alongside a set of items indicating the extent to which they felt harmed by their leader, such as 'my leader has disadvantaged me'. In addition, the participants completed three measures of organisational justice: procedural (are rules applied consistently?), interpersonal (am I treated with respect) and distributive (am I getting the outcomes I deserve?).

Camps and his colleagues predicted that the last measure, distributive justice, would offset the lack of trust in a leader seen as self-serving. Just so: when distributive justice was low, self-serving leadership was strongly related to perceptions of harm, but when it was high, the relationship weakened. The pattern remained even when controlling for other types of justice: what mattered was simply the sense that you haven't been stiffed thus far.

 The team looked at what lies underneath this in a further study which brought new measures into play, specifically looking at levels of uncertainty and of negative emotions. This experimental study used a hypothetical situation, with the 87 participants being asked to imagine that their chances of a potential promotion depended entirely on the decisions of their boss. In one condition the boss was presented as entirely unbiased, whereas the second, self-serving condition, presented the boss as willing to make decisions that directly benefit themselves, such as promoting someone favoured by influences in the company. Participants were then told either that they were offered the promotion or passed over, providing or withholding distributive justice from them.

Participants with a self-serving boss indicated that they were more uncertain about their job, boss and overall situation. Missing out on the promotion led participants to be more upset, measured by ratings of emotion words like angry and frustrated, and that upset was magnified when the boss was presented as self-serving. In this promotion-less, no-justice condition, the high uncertainty and higher negative emotions were bound together. Conversely, when participants received justice in the form of the promotion, levels of uncertainty were decoupled from negative emotions. The boss's motives made no difference to their emotional state.

These studies suggest that when we suspect a leader is working to their own agenda, the resultant uncertainty can be neutralised when we feel we are getting the outcomes we deserve. The authors note that this can be interpreted as participants accepting that 'leaders can act fair and ethically even though their motives are inherently selfish' - but can also be seen as a step away from ethics entirely, into a myopic mentality: I'm alright, Jack. Further research could help us tease these explanations apart.

Jeroen Camps, Stijn Decoster, & Jeroen Stouten (2012). My Share Is Fair, So I Don’t Care: The Moderating Role of Distributive Justice in the Perception of Leaders’ Self-Serving Behavior Journal of Personnel Psychology , 11 (1), 49-59 DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000058

What are the pitfalls of moving away from hierarchy?

What's the best way to organise groups of people?  Experimentally-minded organisations have explored the use of 'autonomous workgroups', where teams are led from within rather than being allocated a supervisor. The psychological benefits are apparent: providing workers with more direct autonomy is well-known to promote motivation. Is the relative rarity of such approaches merely down to inertia within the world of work, or are there some challenges that need consideration? 

In a recent article, Jonas Ingvaldsen and Monica Rolfsen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology present a case study detailing 'Tools', a Norwegian tool company that decided to move from a traditional foreman situation to a flatter structure, partly led by an organisational and national culture that is sympathetic to labour empowerment. The investigators took a qualitative approach, using interviews and focus groups to gather information from team members over 13 years. They began as a new approach kicked off, where each week a different team member took on a spokesperson role. Then, the  workforce was enthusiastic: 'The flat structure has come to stay. We won’t return to the foreman system, where someone points the finger and tells you what to do.'

Yet eight years later, interviews and discussions revealed several issues. Although members wanted to do good by their team, the transient nature of the spokesperson responsibility made it possible to skimp on more onerous and seemingly less essential activities like information-sharing. Moreover, the fact that the spokesperson role was crafted around the team needs meant that when tensions between teams or functions emerged, there were few formal mechanisms to resolve disputes. Spokespeople were unable to enforce decisions that were individually unpopular but better for the larger system:  'self-management ends up with what is optimal for each individual, and that is comfort' - meaning that products were put together on a schedule that was efficient for the team but was harmful to the inventory management.

Tools switched it up. The new system involved distributed leadership, where managerial responsibilities were unbundled and made the responsibility of different team members. In this '5-M' model, one person would look after Man (eg staffing), another Machine, and so on. While this appears to have had some powerful benefits - Mileu specialists can get together in their M-meeting, and discuss how to improve air quality across the organisation - real-life problems don't always fall neatly into boxes. The interviews revealed concerns that non-essential issues often got kicked from one M to another without resolution. Concrete and immediate problems did tend to get resolved rapidly and effectively, but anything big-picture called on co-ordination that no-one was equipped for.

This case study encapsulates some of the benefits and challenges of non-hierarchical methods within large, complex organisations. Are all members dispositionally suited to taking on leadership duties over their existing work? How can they develop mastery and hence satisfaction for these duties when only practiced one week in six? Are the domains that we carve the world into sufficiently legible to the human users who have to operate with them? Worthwhile questions to help us toward a 21st century approach to the workplace.

Jonas A Ingvaldsen, & Monica Rolfsen (2012). Autonomous work groups and the challenge of inter-group coordination Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726712448203

Cynicism is bad for business

When someone we trust takes us for a ride, the bump back to earth is something we're unlikely to forget. But when we suspiciously reject an offer from someone else, we may never know what we've missed out on due to too little trust. Over time, such asymmetries in feedback can tip us toward an unwarranted cynical stance. It's clear that cynicism is as unhelpful a bias as naivety: it leads to guarded communication, reduced  sharing, and more self-serving biases, all of which may cause interactions to nosedive. A recent review by Chia-Jung Tsay and his team from Harvard Business School may help us understand cynicism and how it develops.

The review identifies some key triggers that enhance cynicism, including:

• Being new to negotiation - novices are more likely to believe that negotiation is always competitive;
• Thinking about the power of influence; for instance, knowledge that another party is a sales expert leads negotiators to suspect their offers more;
• Inclusion of a shady character - negotiating groups take the least trustworthy individual in the other group as the best indicator of group trustworthiness;
• Clear power asymmetries - people expect more misrepresentations from authorities with access to hidden information.

The authors point to a range of studies where participants reject offers that are in their rational best interest because of lurking cynicism that puts them off the whole venture. They warn us that the consequence is that "cynicism regarding others' motivations may become a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves both sides worse off than would otherwise be the case." Happily, the review concludes with some advice we might take on to chart a better course:

• perspective-taking to recognise your 'opponent' is an active party in negotiations, cultivating a "healthy skepticism" that considers a full range of motives on their part;
• act with integrity - it increases the likelihood the other party will;
• encourage a level playing field that minimises hidden information;
• foster repeated exposure to specific negotiators to build a history of trust that is costly to undermine.

Try the techniques out, you won't regret it. Trust me.

Tsay, C., Shu, L., & Bazerman, M. (2011). Naïveté and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts The Academy of Management Annals, 5 (1), 495-518 DOI: 10.1080/19416520.2011.587283

Offering pseudo opportunities for expression to employees leads to conflict and withdrawal of voice

Giving organisational members a say on work-related issues is well understood to heighten a sense of trust, respect and fairness. But a manager who invites opinions may not be planning to consider them. They may want to increase employee engagement through paying lip service to 'dialogue'; they may be an autocrat who feels obliged to appear consistent with the organisation's ethos; they may be reflexively doing something they were told to do at business school. So what happens when the opportunity to express is a case of 'pseudo voice' ... and the employees know it?

Gerdien de Vries, Baren Jehn and Bart Terwel investigated this issue by collecting survey data from 137 workers in a Dutch healthcare institution. Each participant rated the presence of two facets necessary for pseudo voice: did they have opportunity to express their voice? and did they believe their manager would disregard it? When the interaction between these was high, employees tended to give low scores to another measure, the extent to which they took opportunities to voice their opinions. In other words, perceiving deceit led to employees keeping their perspectives on issues to themselves.

The participants also rated the amount of intragroup conflict they experienced. De Vreis and colleagues suspected that when employees withdraw voice because they perceive the opportunity as a sham, conflict may increase: employees respond to this 'organisational illegitimacy' by refusing to play by the rules themselves, or squabble with colleagues in a displaced attempt to reclaim some kind of control. The data duly demonstrated this: participants who perceived pseudo voice experienced more team conflict than those who believed their managers were sincere.

Providing employees with voice is important; as well as its cohesive effects, it provides the organisation with a diversity of perspectives. As its authors note, this study is useful as it "provides a better understanding of the conditions under which offering voice opportunity to employees is likely to backfire" - namely, when they are seen as insincere and deceptive. It's notable that in this study, managers indicated a disregard for voice higher than employees suspected, suggesting if anything the employees were credulous rather than cynical towards management contempt for their opinions. But Machiavellian managers who think an unread suggestion box is a worthwhile gamble should beware; as this study shows, the costs to organisational functioning can be substantial.

(Thanks to reader Chris Woock for bringing this article to the Digest's attention.)

Vries, G., Jehn, K., & Terwel, B. (2011). When Employees Stop Talking and Start Fighting: The Detrimental Effects of Pseudo Voice in Organizations Journal of Business Ethics DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-0960-4

Why do subgroups emerge? And how do groups stay productive if they do?

Group working can be sociable, fulfilling and effective, yet there are many ways for it to fall short of the ideal. A mass of similar opinions can lead to groupthink, rushing to agreement without questioning a line of thinking. But a group splintering into subgroups can also lead to problems. Subgrouping doesn't take much, as minimal group research has revealed, and it creates barriers across which information struggles to flow, due to confusion or outright hostility. A new study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior explains how two kinds of group integration – cognition and emotion – influence the impact of subgroups in rather different ways.

A team of researchers lead by Matthew Cronin looked at performance of MBA students in teams of five or six participating in a 14-week business simulation exercise. They surveyed the 321 participants twice, once about three weeks before the end and again at the close of the exercise, determining the extent to which the team had formed subgroups and how satisfied individuals felt about being part of the team.

The researchers also took two measures of integration: affective integration, probing how much they liked and trusted the rest of the team, and cognitive integration, how much common ground members share in terms of how they look at the world. They were interested in how these variables ultimately affected the group' satisfaction, measured in the final survey, and its performance, determined by the final company earnings it achieved.

The data revealed a vicious circle: less affective integration made it more likely that subgroups would emerge later, and more definite subgroups led to subsequent lower integration. Falling into this pattern meant team members felt less satisfied about being part of the team at the end of the event. Moreover, as subgroups emerged, team performance also suffered. But this effect was dampened when there was good cognitive integration. That is, when members are divided, possess diverging agendas and may not particularly like each other, they can still get the job done if they share a framework for looking at the world.

This study is valuable in untangling some of the distinct processes that contribute to healthy team working. In the words of the authors, cognitive integration can “prevent the harm that subgroups can potentially create”. But to stop the subgroups forming in the first place, it comes down to preventing that slide into us-vs-them and the lack of trust that it feeds and is fed by. Stakeholders who want a group to succeed should consider interventions, and make them early to avoid the rot setting in.

Cronin, M., Bezrukova, K., Weingart, L., & Tinsley, C. (2011). Subgroups within a team: The role of cognitive and affective integration Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (6), 831-849 DOI: 10.1002/job.707