The value of developing and maintaining trust is crucial to the informal contract between employee and employer that underpins our productivity and engagement at work.  While various studies have examined what happens to individuals when that trust is abused, an interesting study from Portugal’s ISCTE Business School explores how others react when they see such trust being abused.

It’s perhaps intuitive to accept that when we ourselves experience a breakdown in trust with an employer or manager that we exert some kind of payback, whether in terms of reducing our performance level, limiting our commitment to our work, or even quitting.  The researchers argue that it’s less clear-cut how such breaches of trust affect those who witness them, so they set out to find out.

Loss of trust

The authors argue that our colleagues are often a crucial conduit by which we understand how things work in our organization.  Couple this with the close bonds we form with our colleagues and when they suffer a breach of trust it can have a distinct impact on us too.  Such a breach can prompt us to think just how committed our employer or manager is to us.  Might we also be on the receiving end of such treatment?

The researchers found that our feelings towards our manager or employer at the time we learned about the treatment of our colleague played a big role in how we responded to their situation.  If our own relationship is good then we can often overlook the treatment of a colleague as it doesn’t reflect our own experience.  If our own experience is bad, however, then the treatment of our colleague will merely exacerbate the negative feelings we have towards our boss or employer.

The perceived intentionality of the wrongdoing also plays a role in how we respond, as does the severity of the breach.  If the wrongdoing is seen as both intentional and severe, this understandably causes us to be more vigilant about the actions of our manager or employer as we look for possible cues that indicate similar actions may be coming our way.

Managerial response

Obviously a first step would be for managers not to disabuse the trust people have in them and the organization, but the researchers hope that their work also highlights the important role context plays in understanding how their actions could be perceived.  This is crucial as their actions will be watched by others and will not be constrained to a single individual.

The authors also believe that managers would be well served by monitoring the expectations employees have and be prepared to justify the way they treat employees to their wider team.  Equally, they should appreciate that not all promises need to be explicitly made, as employees could have expectations that are merely implied.

In this sense, the authors argue that organizations should be promoting the role managers play in helping employees make sense of the workplace and how meaning is given to events.  This can help to make the situation a satisfying one for the team.