Effects of Trust in Management

10 Pages 2609 Words

Introduction
A few weeks ago, I was watching the evening news with a friend of mine. A breaking story came on announcing Arthur Anderson’s use of unethical accounting practices in the Enron scandal. I asked Shannon if she knew anything about the firm’s involvement, and she said in disbelief that she had not. The interesting fact here is that Shannon works for Anderson Consulting. In that moment, she lost all trust in the company and is now looking for a new job. Trust plays a pivotal role in every corporation’s daily activities; it can be a specific management tactic, or a mediating variable in a work team. Increased trust between managers and subordinates will lead to increased productivity and job commitment. However, this type of persuasive discourse is often very difficult to consciously achieve because of the numerous factors involved. This paper will address contemporary ideas on establishing trust in organizations, its effects and includes an informal study on the use of managerial trust.
Literature Review
Over the past few years, the topic of trust in management has received much scholarly attention. The fall of Enron and other such recent scandals where hundreds of employees lost their jobs may explain this. As Caudron (1996) explains it, “Management has lost all credibility, employees are scared, and organizational trust has hit rock bottom.”
An article by Ellen Whitener et al. (1998) explores the many practices managers must engage in to gain employee trust. She begins by defining managerial trust in three facets. First, trust relies on the trustor’s belief that the trustee will act benevolently. Second, trust relies on the concept that risk is involved. Third, there is some degree of dependency in the relationship (Whitener, p. 513). Here, trust is viewed as an attitude the trustor has about the trustee.
Whitener uses two theories to analyze the motivation behind trust strategies, agen...