BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
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n 1986, when Ronald Reagan was preparing for nuclear treaty negotiations with then-Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, his adviser suggested that Reagan ought to learn a few Russian proverbs. According to
Trusting relationships at work lead to the tendency to help others, enhanced job satisfaction and personal motivation, greater commitment and productivity, argues Namporn Thanetsunthorn in a paper entitled The impact of national culture on corporate social responsibility . This workplace trust then relates to the success and competitiveness of an organisation; see The influence of trust on the trilogy of knowledge creation, sharing and transfer , compiled by Dolores Sanchez Bengoa and Hans Ruediger Kaufmann. Moreover, trust fosters co-operation and teamwork, reduces unnecessary bureaucratic control and administrative costs. Trust is essential for efficient communication and sharing of knowledge. It is through trusting relationships that we improve our creativity at work. In this way, an organisation with high trust between its employees develops a competitive advantage, leading to enhanced organisational performance, say Roy J Lewicki, Daniel J McAllister and Robert J Bies in Trust and distrust: new relationships and realities . However, the many benefits of trusting relationships at work do not mean we should drop our guard completely and decide to trust others without first auditing the personal and professional risks of doing so. When we trust other people, we take a gamble. We need trusting relationships to function in our daily lives and, to some extent, our social order and social capital depends on trusting others. This does not imply that we should put ourselves at risk since, when our trust is misplaced or abused, the costs can be very high. That said, we decide to take risks daily when we trust others and perhaps it would be more prudent to always perform some sort of risk assessment. When we trust another person, we are willing to become vulnerable because of that decision (Roderick M Kramer, Trust and distrust in organizations ). For this reason, we must always be careful with our assessments of trustworthiness. This argument could be summarised thus: “Only decide to trust others with your eyes open.” A pragmatic approach might be to always verify that we place our trust in the right people. Complexities of the concept Twitter’s ‘blue tick’ system, for example, has been an attempt to implement a verification process that can counter bots and trolls. Twitter initially began verifying accounts in 2009 to differentiate between real people and fake accounts, since famous people including the likes of Donald Trump were being impersonated – the reason Trump himself uses the handle @realDonaldTrump. Without such a verification process, it is argued, we cannot be certain that Twitter accounts are genuine.
The Washington Post , the phrase he liked best was “trust, but verify”, something that he was fond of repeating in further meetings with Gorbachev. The phrase entered the political lexicon to such an extent that Barack Obama also used it to explain his stance when facing Vladimir Putin in 2009. It continues to be in use to this day; then‑US secretary of state Mike Pompeo adapted it to “distrust and verify” when dealing with the Chinese Communist Party. As managers, we make judgements about trust and the trustworthiness of others all the time. Trust judgements come in a variety of different forms. For example, we place our trust in legal agreements, in the members of our team and the people we meet. In the workplace, we place our trust in the interpersonal relationships that we develop with other people in our organisation. Sometimes this trust is earned by the behaviours of others, while sometimes we take a risk and follow our gut instincts about a person. Whether we trust someone also depends very much on the context, since our attitudes towards another person may differ according to where we meet them, be that in the office or in a darkened alley. We may assume that trust is linear, being either trust or distrust, but some have argued that the construct is more complex. For example, trust judgements may be influenced by the culture to which we belong. According to Helen Altman Klein, emeritus professor of psychology at Wright State University, the way we assess the trustworthiness of others is affected by our cultural background. These complexities must be addressed both cautiously and responsibly. In our professional lives, we may be misled by a narrow perspective on trustworthiness, expecting people from other cultures to have the same trust concept. For example, my personal expectations about trustworthiness were developed in the UK and I recognise that my students, being multicultural, will have different perspectives. But what do we mean by ‘trust,’ and why should trust be of interest to graduates, managers and business school practitioners? Workplace benefits The benefits of trust in the workplace are well documented and trust has been described as the social glue that holds relationships together.
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