Hrm Productivity

In today's business climate, trust is at an all-time low (Lewicki). When trust is eroded, productivity is severely affected. For example, distrusting companies/bosses will set up policies and/or procedures that require work to be checked excessively and employees' decisions are frequently questioned. The result is workplace inefficiency and lack of employee commitment.

Trust fuels productivity much more effectively than any other motivational technique. Yet, our organizations are staffed by skeptics and cynics of our own making. Not adhering to our stated values, layoffs, poorly integrated acquisitions, and the latest fad in management science lead to an atmosphere of mistrust. According to Curral, the best workplaces there exists an atmosphere of mutual trust between management and employees. Trust, according to these experts, is defined by a partnership between employees and management and the recognition that employees add value to the organization (Currall).

Trust may be especially difficult to cultivate in a team based work environment in which interpersonal politics, ambition, laziness, and even greed cause otherwise wonderful employees to withhold their effort either out of self-preservation or anger. To establish mutual trust, organizations must share information, tell the truth, and treat employees as adults. Yet, ironically, publicly traded corporations cannot share much with employees that they are not willing to share with investors. In the book, Built on Trust, Arky Ciancutti and Thomas Steding wrote, “Many of today’s leaders have not been training in the emotional aspects of high-performance team life. In business schools, the emotional content of teams is often given lip service but not effectively addressed. Yet emotions are at the core of any team. To produce extraordinary results, we need to understand how such emotional dynamics as trust, fear, dignity, and meaning operate on teams.

Trust is personal. It is between two people. When organizations "trust" each other it is a result of trust between individuals in the organization. Hence, trust and its benefits in productivity are destroyed when the expectations of an individual in an organization is not met by an individual in another organization.

When new individuals enter an established relationship is when the risk of destroying trust is the highest. Unfortunately, not many people recognize the benefits of trust and consequently, do not rate the impact of trust being destroyed as being high.

Therefore, to maintain the benefits of trust between organizations it is incumbent upon the individuals currently involved in the relationship to bring the new person into the fold, building their trust and their belief that trust has economic benefits (Zaheer).

Organizations that recognize the value of trust and actively discourage activities, which would destroy trust, whilst actively encouraging activities and a culture, which values trust, reap a significant competitive advantage.

Trust, however, is not static. Trust is destroyed when the positive expectations of conduct, which underpin the willingness