Mistrust as Declining Capital
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Mistrust is a sign of declining capital. So far researchers have analyzed trust much more than distrust in organizational science. In general terms, trust will turn into distrust when promises are clearly broken, commitments unmistakably circumvented and contracts purposefully violated. These actions go straight to the heart of trust capital, also causing irreparable damage to legitimacy, satisfaction and acceptance. Distrust restricts and impedes social interaction by making people fear arbitrary action, betrayal and even coercion. In analyzing distrust, it is important to differentiate the following concepts: factors causing distrust, repercussions of distrust and strategies by which distrust can be restored to become trust. Figure 3 depicts the relationships between these concepts.
Figure 3: Distrust as a Process
Factors of Mistrust
Factors causing distrust could begin to evolve in face-to-face contacts and in small group relations from which it could diffuse, in time, through the whole organization. These factors affect the interpersonal system in the organization and have an impact on the all parties involved and the fundamental relationships between them (Lewicki & Benedict Bunker, 1996, p. 129). Table 4 summarizes the factors of behavior that violate trust between people (Bies & Tripp, 1996, p. 249).
| A damaged sense of "civic order"
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Mistrust factors could vary from organization to organization. About one hundred senior civil servants used a creative group technique to produce real or potential distrust factors in their organization during a training course in 2001. They produced about 20 different factors of mistrust from which the following five were the most commonly mentioned by respondents:
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Inconsistency between words and deeds
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Favoritism
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Lack of openness
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A sense of injustice
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Speaking and spreading rumors behind people's backs
On another occasion about 50 high-ranking businessmen were asked the same question with the same method as above. They scrutinized intensively the problems of mistrust in their organizations and produced the following factors of distrust which got the highest number of votes (Harisalo & Huttunen, 2001):
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Lack of openness
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Harmful competition between departments
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Avoidance of responsibility
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Dishonesty and empty promises
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Inequality between people in different positions
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Management has the attitude of "being always right"
Mistrust factors seem to be quite specific and vary from situation to situation. If we are right in our assertion, it means that we must be very careful when analyzing the roots and reasons for mistrust. The severity of the mistrust factors could also vary from organization to organization. Organizations are different, as are their capacities to generate mistrust. There could be organizations in which mistrust factors are stronger and more persistent than factors engendering trust.
Outcomes of Mistrust
Mistrust has its own unique outcomes. It is a grave mistake for management to understate them as soft organizational problems that could be overcome by concentrating on hard facts in planning, budgeting and managing. It is not a soft problem, because numbers, the hard facts, are its derivatives at least to some extent. If mistrust has a deleterious effect on the organization's capability to innovate, work efficiently and deal with people humanely, it will also weaken its financial base quite severely. Mistrust is a hard fact and it should be understood as such.
Research has shown that mistrust is people's declining willingness to cooperate and collaborate, followed by problems in communication and growing dissatisfaction with management and working conditions (Harisalo & Stenvall, 2002). Mistrust causes inefficiency, passivity, evasion and makes conflicts difficult to resolve. Table 5 depicts other ways by which people react to distrust (Bies & Tripp, 1996, p. 255).
| Revenge "fantasies" Do nothing
Private confrontation Identity restoration
Social withdrawal
"Feuding"
Forgiveness |
Major betrayals of trust are traumatic experiences for people. They sap people's energy, cloud their thinking, undermine their motivation and upset their productivity (Reina & Reina, 1999, p. 37). People whose trust has been violated begin to protect themselves against future action and probably even to plan to take revenge on whoever let them down (Reina & Reina, 1999, p. 37). Mistrust crucially affects the financial base of the organization making it difficult for management to recuperate losses.
Strategies to Heal Mistrust
It is possible to stop the process from trust to distrust provided management is willing to tackle mistrust factors quickly without letting the situation deteriorate. The worse mistrust becomes, the more difficult it is to correct. This is because distrust goes to the core of human vulnerability and cuts through us to our deepest emotional layers (Reina & Reina, 1999, p. 37; Bies & Tripp, pp. 251–252). Different methods of dealing with distrust have been developed. Individuals, for instance, can give up wanting, reduce dependence and control the trustees (Kipnis, 1996, pp. 42–43). Management can make use of surveys as an early warning technique to anticipate the development of distrust factors in the organization and assess their seriousness. There are different group interventions management can apply.
The purpose of turning mistrust into trust is to set the organization back on its proper track because trust promotes inspirational efficiency, creativity, and humane working conditions. Thus, management must learn both to nurture trust capital and to save the organization from distrust. These are challenging managerial requirements for any organization wishing to win people's brains and hearts.
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EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 143