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Appearance can play a powerful role in how people perceive leaders. Dr. Elaine Wong offers insight into how this process works within organizations.

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Many of our career choices are informed by our family. We learn what career choices are appropriate and which paths to that career are acceptable — going to college, for instance. But our families are also informed by broader cultural influences. Join Dr. Nadya Fouad as she introduces this fascinating topic.

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Dr. Michael Haselhuhn is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Dr. Haselhuhn’s research focuses on in the social-cognitive underpinnings of organizational behavior. He is particularly interested in how people’s beliefs and emotions influence trust, negotiation, and cooperation.

Trust is essential in the workplace.  With high levels of trust, organizations are more successful, leaders are more effective, and negotiators are able to create more value.  Traditional approaches to understanding the impact of trust have focused on the presence or absence of trust in a relationship—for example, considering whether employees are happier and more productive when they trust their direct supervisor.  Recently, however, researchers and practitioners alike have recognized the importance of trust dynamics, or how trust can ebb and flow over time.  How does trust develop?  What can be done to maintain a trusting relationship?  Can trust ever fully recover after a violation?  These are the important questions at the forefront of trust research today, and new findings are helping us to better understand the role of trust in organizations:

• Trust can develop quickly.  Contrary to the common perception that trust typically builds slowly over time, researchers have consistently demonstrated that trust can develop immediately in new relationships.  Individuals often have high (perhaps even irrationally high) immediate levels of trust in others.  The implication of this work suggests that organizations and individuals may wish to focus their efforts on maintaining trust in new relationships rather than focusing on building trust in the first place.

• Trust isn’t always fragile.  Trust scholars have typically assumed that trust violations significantly and irreparably harm trust.  More recent research, however, suggests that the relationship between trust violations and trust is complicated.  For example, perceptions of intentions matter.  When victims attribute violations to intentional behavior, trust is harmed significantly more than when the same behavior is attributed to the inability of the violator to fulfill expectations.  Other work has shown that initial levels of trust affect how objectively untrustworthy actions are perceived.  For example, one recent study demonstrated that following a contract breach, employees who had high levels of initial trust in their employer were both less likely to recognize the violation and less likely to reduce their trust in their employer than were employees who had low levels of initial trust in their employer.  The message from this research is that trust is stronger than we might typically think.

• Different wrongs, different remedies.  Once broken, how can trust be effectively repaired?  Transgressors have a number of tools at their disposal, should they wish to rebuild trust.  For example, they can accept responsibility and apologize to the aggrieved party.  Alternatively, they can deny culpability for the transgression.  Recent research tells us that the effectiveness of trust recovery actions depends on characteristics of the transgression.  If a transgression can be attributed to a lack of integrity (e.g., intentionally lying in a negotiation), apologies are relatively ineffective in rebuilding trust—by accepting responsibility for the action, the transgressor is admitting to a flaw in his or her moral character.  In such situations, according to research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (2004) by Kim et al., denying responsibility for the act in question is more effective in rebuilding trust in others.  In contrast, transgressions that stem from a lack of competence (e.g., unknowingly violating the law) can most successfully be mitigated by accepting responsibility and detailing the steps that will be taken in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  This shows that there is no “one size fits all” solution to rebuilding trust in a relationship.

Work in the field of trust dynamics is ongoing, and important insights continue to be made.  Given the importance of trust in every aspect of social interaction, this work is truly important for the home, the workplace, and everywhere in between.

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