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Anyone who has ever had a workplace relationship where trust has broken down will understand the detrimental toll it can take on work, productivity and motivation.
However, as with personal relationships, experts say trust at work can repaired, although the type of trust lost will often determine the difficulty of the process. “Broadly, there are two main types of trust open to violation in workplaces,” says Dr Mara Olekalns, professor of management (negotiations) at Melbourne Business School. “One relates to a person’s competence and ability. It is the kind of trust that is straightforward to establish, easy to break and pretty easy to mend,” she says. For instance, if a colleague or employee fails to complete a task on time, one slip-up can be forgiven easily, but if it happens again, trust in their ability to deliver may begin to evaporate. “The other is more intuitive or emotions-based,” Olekalns explains. “It is trust from the heart, rather than the head, where you will assess the other person’s intentions. “You’ll be weighing up, ‘Do you have integrity? Are you benevolent? Do we share the same goals and values? Are your actions and your words consistent with those values?’” One possible scenario is where one employee has worked hard to deliver a big piece of work, but they overhear a colleague or manager take credit for it. Another is if a company’s senior leaders say they care about gender diversity yet the company practices do not support that claim. This type of integrity-based trust is the more difficult to establish and to repair, Olekalns says. “If I believe you have good intentions and shared values and you do something that does not stack up, it leads me to question the fundamental roots of our relationship,” she explains. For the six steps for repairing broken trust in the workplace as suggested by the experts, read the full story at INTHEBLACK Comments are closed.
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