trust in a changing world

Guest editorial

Trust in a changing worldDenise Skinner

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strategic Change, March–April 2005

Strat. Change 14: 59–61 (2005)Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jsc.710 Strategic Change

Public and private sector organizations operate in an environmentwhere the ability to successfully manage continuous change and toestablish cooperative inter- and intra-organizational relationshipshas become accepted as necessary for survival. Many of the ingre-dients for successful change in an organization have also been iden-tified as areas in which trust has a significant contribution to make,not least in the context of the relationships between individualsand groups. Change requires the sustained commitment and good-will of staff at every level, and it has been argued that trust can sig-nificantly increase both commitment (Lamsa and Savolainen, 2000)and effectiveness (Roy and Dugal, 1998). Management and employ-ees can more effectively achieve organizational goals if they trustand cooperate with each other, for leadership based purely on theuse of power, knowledge and control does not create a sustainablebasis for motivating others or for generating commitment. Thepotential cost of trust deficits, therefore, is enormous and thenature, role and contribution of trust are important factors whichneed to be explored in the context of attaining successful change.

Change within organizations has, in many cases, challenged long-established traditions, certainties, structures, working practicesand assumptions; undermining, in many cases, the very founda-tions on which trust has existed. From an employee perspectivedecades of change have had a significant impact on the employ-ment relationship. Organizational change is often perceived asdestabilizing and threatening, leaving obligations and expectationsunfulfilled, often leading to vulnerability and loss of security. In thefirst two papers of this special issue, trust is considered in thecontext of far-reaching changes that would significantly impact onthe people involved. Ian Harwood and Melanie Ashleigh’sresearch was undertaken in the context of acquisition and divest-ment in a multinational healthcare organization. Open communi-cation is often cited as a prerequisite of trust, yet there are stagesduring and after a merger or acquisition process when limits tocommunication may be perceived to be essential and may beenforced through confidentiality agreements. Vulnerability and risk

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are key factors in precipitating trust between parties, but they arealso factors that a confidentiality agreement seeks to control. Thusthe relationship between the two is complex and the inherent con-flict between the two inevitably has implications both for the indi-viduals involved and the wider organization.

In the second paper, Natalie Ferres, Julia Connell and AnthonyTravaglione explore issues of trust in the context of organizationaldownsizing. In their research they have measured and comparedthe levels of organizational trust and connected variables withintwo groups of Australian public health sector employees, one ofwhich was facing redeployment due to hospital closure. Thehypothesis that the redeployment group would exhibit lower levelsof trust, justice and transformational leadership proved unfounded.The significant differences which did emerge were a higher levelof intention to leave among the redeployment group but, moreunexpectedly, this group also displayed a higher level of emotionalattachment to the organization which, the authors suggest, maywell have been linked to the higher level of transformational leadership also reported in the closing hospital.

The third paper deals with incremental change within an orga-nization and highlights the importance of building trust based onunderstanding. Gerhard Smid, Katinka Bijlsma-Frankema, HansDerksen and George Bernaert argue that agreements on innova-tions and trust are dynamic phenomena and stress the need to payattention to the mental accounts of actors and the embeddednessof these accounts in the context in which the change takes place.Using interviews and causal loop modeling, the authors sought tounderstand why participation in innovation programmes wasdecreasing in a Dutch cooperative multinational.Their results high-light the importance of risk management, shared values, previousexperience and third-party knowledge in creating the necessaryenvironment for trust-based cooperation.

Significant change has also occurred in the form of newapproaches to work and the structure of organizations. These newapproaches mean fundamental changes to the nature of man-agement and collaboration in which the role, and extent, of trust increasingly becomes an issue. In the fourth paper, KaisaHenttonen and Kirsimarja Blomqvist consider one such newapproach, the virtual team, where members are geographically dis-persed and may never meet, and the way in which trust developsin the early stages of such a team being formed. They argue thatfactors such as trust, commitment and communication are crucialas in traditional teams, but they caution that to approach virtualteams as simply an extension of traditional teams is likely toincrease cost without realizing the potential benefits.

Within the four papers presented in this special edition, the issueof trust and change has been explored in very different contextsand from different perspectives. Each in turn illustrates the impor-tant contribution of trust and the complexity of the issues involved,


particularly in organizational change scenarios. In this way the articles highlight both the possibilities and the difficulties, anddemonstrate that exhortations for organizations to create the con-ditions in which this ‘fragile and limited commodity’ (Seligman,1997: 156) can flourish may be a considerable, albeit necessary,challenge.

Biographical note

Denise Skinner is Reader in Strategic HRM and Leader of the HRMand OB Research Area at Oxford Brookes University BusinessSchool. Her research interests include trust in the context of theemployment relationship and the management and evaluation ofchange. She has published in national and international journalsincluding Human Resource Management Journal, The Interna-tional Journal of Public Sector Management, Strategic Changeand Evaluation.

References

Lamsa A, Savolainen T. 2000. The nature of managerial commitment tostrategic change. Leadership and Organisation Development Journal21(6): 297–306.

Roy M, Dugal S. 1998. Developing trust: the importance of cognitive flexibility and co-operative contexts. Management Decision 36(9):561–567.

Seligman A. 1999. Trust and sociability: on the limits of confidence androle expectations. Hume Papers on Public Policy 17(3): 16–25.

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