Cultivating Trust in Employee Relations

Abstract

At the heart of employment relations is the desire of both management and employees to create an ideal and efficient and effective organisation. However, this does not always happen, and both employers and employees and their representatives share the blame. For employees and their representatives, the “us against them” attitude is a catalyst for distrust. For employers, inflexibility and autocratic leadership styles make effective human resource management extremely difficult. Through interviews with management and union representatives, this experimental research explores causes of distrust, offers solutions and ends by suggesting the adoption of the Soft Human Resource Management (SHRM) approach as a solution to enhance trust in employee relations. The study focused on trust in organisations that have unionised workers.

1. Introduction

Why do most employees have little or no trust in their employers? We spend many hours of our working lives at the workplace yet we find that to a large extent, there is little or no trust in our employee relations. Generally speaking, in many organisations in Zambia, for whatever reasons the absence of trust exists, the effects are negative on organisational morale and performance, particularly when all parties feel and can justify that their position is right. Justification is always supported with genuine examples, thus making the cultivation of trust difficult. Parties involved become embroiled in investigations and manoeuvres to further justify their positions to prove their stance.

An indicator of the importance of trust in employee relations is the extensive literature that exists on trust in the workplace and in general. Research results on the effects of mutual trustworthiness between labour and management concluded that labour-management representatives must recognise the importance of mutual trustworthiness in employee relations in their efforts to adopt high-performance work systems [1]. Employee’s lack of trust in their employers is not a new phenomenon. Researchers acknowledge deep and structurally embedded conflicts of interest and worker alienation Thompson [2]. According to Francois [3], findings on trust in union leaders and the decline in union membership concluded that this is a result of failure by union leaders to lead by example, poor communication, lack of training and unfair practices.

A survey by Deloitte [4] indicates that one-third of the survey participants desire new employment; of this group, almost half cite a distrust in their company. The Elderman Trust Barometer [5] reported that 82% of employees do not trust their bosses to tell the truth. When employees have little faith in their leaders, businesses experience several negative consequences. Employees feel less invested in the outcome of the business. This results in lower productivity as employees may miss work and deadlines and become indifferent to disciplinary action from managers. Trust in employee relations is important for organisational performance and is linked to outcomes such as reduced employee turnover, better profits and generally improved cooperation among employees. Many employees tend to have negative views about their employers [6] just as many employers have negative views about their employees.

Elgoibar et al. [7] defined trust as “the expectation that the other party will cooperate in the future.” Since it is an expectation, they further argue that trust and distrust often appear together; that distrust appears mainly when the other party violates the psychological contract¹ or formal agreements. In the case of organisations, distrust usually appears in downsizing, corporate restructuring situations or when the information is partial or invalid [7]. Characteristics of both trust and distrust are summarised in Table 1:

High trust; Characterised by: hope, faith, confidence and initiative	Low distrust; Characterised by: no fear, absence of scepticism, absence of cynicism, low monitoring and no vigilance
Low trust; Characterised by: no hope, no faith, no confidence, passivity and hesitance.	High distrust; Characterised by: fear, scepticism, cynicism, wariness and vigilance

Table 1.

Characteristics of high and low trust.

Source: Elgoibar et al. [7].

Examples of behaviours that indicate a lack of trust by employees in organisations include:

1. Employees do only what needs to be done and are anxious to knock off. Trust has been found to explain why some employees effectively complete their jobs and in addition go above and beyond the call of duty in their work without clear recompense [8].

2. Limited collaboration, cooperation and information sharing; practice of the safe decision making to avoid conflict; where the management style is top-down and top management believe influence comes with their titles. Employees and union leaders are taken by surprise at decisions made and implemented without joint consultation.

3. Pertinent information required for good decision-making is withheld; lack of open and honest feedback, input and dialogue are rare. “Successful relations with management are dependent on openness but also access to reliable and up-to-date- information – the latter is not always guaranteed”—union leader [13].

4. Employees ignore emails or pretend they have not read them. Managers that wonder why employees push back, miss the mark and second-guess their advice might want to consider a less obvious problem – an underlying lack of trust (Hinojosa, P).²

5. Too many dark corner meetings, rumours and grapevine news. It is unwise to instantly dismiss grapevine news as petty and untrue; while it might be distorted, it may serve as a pointer to something happening. Persistent rumours are not always without merit [9].

6. Complaining, finger-pointing, blaming; no personal accountability; decision-makers say one thing and do another.

7. Lack of transparency – transparency is important because it goes hand in hand with trust. Without these two, workplace culture and relationships suffer. Lies and secrets break trust, while honesty and transparency build trust. When trust is created, it leads to a heightened sense of security and better employee performance (fierceinc).³

8. Policies, systems and procedures are grounded in a belief that employees cannot be trusted and have to be monitored and controlled. “Management doesn’t consider us part of the decision making process. If they don’t trust us, we can’t trust them.” (union representative).

9. Managers assume the worst of their subordinates; do not trust them to do their work.

10. Managers showing favouritism – when a leader shows favouritism, it works against a culture of trust [10]. Superior’s actions through which favouritism is identified include: spending time and socialising with favourites, praises even in small achievements, overlooking mistakes, enjoying more benefits than others in the same position. This results in other employees feeling disliked and end up being resentful, angry, jealous and losing trust in the leader.

Available from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trust−the−new−workplace−currency/201405/10−ways−tell−trust−is−lacking−where−you−work.

Despite the importance of trust, organisational environments often challenge the trust that employees bestow on organisations. As trends toward downsizing, restructuring, and temporary employment continues, perceptions of unfair treatment, broken contracts and experiences of betrayal remain a part of the organisational landscape [11].

The above examples of causes of distrust in employers and management by employees are often exacerbated by the “us versus them” attitude, which serves to deepen distrust in the work situation. Much as unions have a legitimate right to organize, they need to guard against the dangers of firstly uniting against management and secondly their leaders focusing on adversities. Probably a weakness in managers, resulting in their positions of authority, is that they take trust for granted and assume their employees can be kept at arm’s length without guidance on how to improve performance.

1.1 Trust models

Building trust can be a complicated process depending on attitudes. Paul English (2020) [12] quotes HR consultant Robert Fisher that there are four basic trust models shown below:

Suspicious still—do not ever trust anyone, even after they have done something nice. “My relationship with the management is difficult and the management trusts me never and not in any matters. It’s not possible to increase trust.” (union representative)—It is not possible to build trust with such a negative attitude. Once betrayed, the reaction can be anger, bitterness, hurt, vengeance, etc. Leaving one believing that they can never trust again, and wondering why they trusted the management in the first place, and believed they would have integrity.

Suspicious until—do not trust anyone until they prove themselves. “Trust should be earned. I definitely can’t say that I deem everyone trustworthy until they prove otherwise” [13]. Thornton [14] writes that trust is eroded by waiting for others to earn our trust in that when we meet new people and immediately think that they have to earn our trust, then we are intentionally withholding trust from them. It is a “wait and see” attitude that leads to Low Trust in Table 1.

On the other hand, this is a slightly better attitude that can provide the beginning of trust-building.

Trust until—trust people until they screw up. “If you begin every relationship not trusting that is what you are seeking unconsciously. Trust should be given to all and it is for those people to break that trust and that is when it is taken away. It is called seeing the best in everyone until you are proven otherwise.” [15]. Broken trust is not always easy to mend and it causes people to withhold trust. ‘Trust until’ is another negative attitude if it is prolonged. Such an attitude should also call for self-examination in that employees may have unrealistic expectations of their employers.

Trust still—trust people even after they make mistakes, sometimes even when they hurt you. This attitude works in important relationships necessary for continuity, and perhaps coupled with a genuine apology by the betrayer. Thus, trust is also a risk, and most people are victims of betrayal of one level or another. Kwon⁴ offers positive advice by suggesting that the only way to know if you can trust somebody again is to trust them. “If we never allow ourselves any vulnerability, we lose out on the opportunity to make incredibly deep and meaningful connections that open up our lives in ways that couldn’t happen any other way.”

People can evolve from the ‘suspicious still’ to get to ‘trust still’ stage, i.e., trusting people even after they have wronged you or treated you unfairly. In the workplace, stages 1 (suspicious still) and 2 (suspicious until) are negative and ingredients for distrust. Stage 3 is safe unless people actually ‘screw up’. English concludes by saying “People at the positive top of the trust diagram are generally more successful in life than those on the bottom. Part of this is that you often need to trust colleagues to have them perform at their highest levels” [12].

Can organisational employees evolve to stage 4? What techniques can be used to cultivate trust to evolve to this stage? Below are the findings of the study of causes of lack of trust by employees and their representatives in management or employers.

2. Findings

2.1 Reasons for distrust: Employees and unions

1. Information Hiding by Management—unions resent this and become suspicious whenever there is an absence of information flow between themselves and management. It is perceived as a sign that there is no middle ground to share vital information necessary for mutual existence; management is management. Information gathered from corridors and hearsay fosters immediate distrust.

2. Management’s Stance on Inclusiveness—whenever unions are not included on the organisation’s strategic committees (e.g., Council and Senate in a university) with the result that there is no input on important decisions from employee representatives, decisions are questioned, and inevitable outcomes are infighting and distrust.

3. No Joint Consultations—a consequence of ii above; meaning unions are not regarded as part of stakeholders; they do not have decision rights and are seen as trouble makers. Management’s unilateral decision-making is a premise to lack of trust by employees and their representatives. Unions, therefore, resort to planting spies to gather information which is then shared with their members, leading to uniting against management.

4. Questionable Financial Management—where evidence exists that the organisation does not have adequate resources, has a huge wage bill, and is carrying a huge debt (e.g., unpaid retirees and contract gratuities), yet it embarks on, for example, employing more staff, taking numerous expensive trips, and construction of unimportant infrastructure is seen as a sign of poor financial management. Retirees remain on the payroll and the wage bill continues to increase.

5. No Adherence to Strategic Plans—where there is little or no reference to well-written and published strategic plans to verify that activities are aligned to plans, and which plans the unions are not involved in the drafting, leaves employees and their representatives without a sense of ownership of the plans. Unions end up criticising strategic plans and untrustworthy management styles.

6. Broken Promises—this is a perfect example of ‘suspicious until’ and ‘trust until’ in the trust model. For most human beings, ‘broken promises’ is equivalent to ‘broken trust’ in relationships. When promises are broken by employers/management, it increases the magnitude of violations, the number of past violations, and the perception that the offender intended to commit the violation and raises distrust. To distrust is to have no confidence in someone or something.

7. Inequities in Career Progression and Remuneration—this is perhaps the most damaging cause of distrust, whether blatantly or subtly practiced. According to Equity Theory, individuals are motivated by a sense of fairness in their interactions. Perceptions of inequity create suspicion and tension within employees and drive them to action that will reduce perceived inequity.

2.2 Suggestions on how to build trust

2.2.1 Union perspective

It can be seen that distrust arises as a result of the experiences mentioned above, and that employees have no incentive to be cooperative where there is no trust. To build trust in employee relations, employees and their representatives suggested the following:

1. Social Partnerships—defined as “stable relations of mutual recognition, institutionalised co-operation and regulated conflict between organised labour, organised business and government” [16]. This would be a good point to begin to eliminate distrust, where employees and unions work together, involving coordinating the collaboration of key interests. Management needs to treat employees and their representatives as equal stakeholders who should be trusted with vital information and involved in decision-making.

2. Create an Inclusive Culture and allow room for differences—an inclusive workplace is one where people with all kinds of differences feel welcome and valued for their contributions and have the same opportunities for advancement, rewards talent and hard work and invites participation from employees. Employees and their representatives should be given a say in the way the organisation is run; they should not be seen as overstepping their mandate when they question certain management decisions.

3. There should be a platform to share information—sharing data or information transparently ensures that everyone is in the loop, and that everyone is aware of any potential issues with the business, product or service that can be addressed in a collaborative manner [17]. This would eliminate the use of spies to get information—an embarrassment to management if found out—which also results in distrust in fellow managers as they wonder who squealed.

4. Employ the Equity Theory—Equity is determined by comparing one’s input-outcome ratio with the input-outcome ratio of a referent. When the two ratios are equal, equity exists [18]. It is said “justice is in the eyes of the beholder.” Management should pay attention to being perceived as fair by creating a sense of justice in the entire organisation. Unions care about how their members are treated as their mandate demands.

5. Equality in the distribution of resources.

6. Provide more training and support to prevent employees from feeling stuck in their positions without hope of progression. This builds trust and reduces turnover.

7. Include employee representatives in formulating policies to reduce distrust; do not just announce new policies endorsed by management.

8. Empower the union by trusting them; they will in turn trust the management team.

9. Value the employees.

10. Avoid disjoint between various decision-making bodies and work in unison to avoid throwing unpopular decisions at each other.

2.2.2 Management perspective

From a management point of view, one CEO itemised the following as ways of enhancing trust in the organisation he works for:

1. “I wish everybody was a Rotarian” were his opening words. The first of Rotary’s Four Way Tests is “Is it the Truth?” He lives by this quote. “Above all else, reflect the truth as clearly as possible. Honesty helps you gain respect.” He cited an example of politicians who make a lot of promises during election campaigns but fail to deliver after being voted in. There is no truth in that. He stressed that a CEO should be mindful that subordinates should not see him as a dishonest person because this destroys trust.

2. “Walk the Talk” is his motto, because he strives not to undermine his leadership by betraying his values, in particular, being truthful as stated in 1 above. As far as possible, he tries to align his words with his actions, and admits that is not always easy. Leaders that are seen to be believable are more readily trusted by subordinates.

3. Avoid making promises you are unable to keep—this makes you lose respect. If promises are broken due to circumstances beyond your control, communicating this is better than keeping quiet about it while subordinates wait for it to happen.

4. To be seen to be fair—“If I grant a request for employee A and deny the same request for employee B, I am not being fair. It is important to be consistent in what I do in order to remain trustworthy.”

5. To show interest in staff welfare through sharing relevant information.

6. Do the right thing—“Everything I do is driven by the desire to do the right thing.”

7. Confidentiality—CEOs have to keep certain information private in order to be trusted. A breach in confidentiality, whether about a superior or subordinate, arouses immediate distrust.

8. However, the findings in Section 3.1 reveal that employees and union leadership’s perspective of the CEO did not reflect what the CEO had to say concerning his leadership style. They do not trust him and see him as a leader that does not walk the talk. This perspective ties in with the conceptual framework of Mayer et al. [19] which examines three trustee attributes, i.e., ability, benevolence and integrity as predictors of trust in leaders. Ability reflects the knowledge, skills and aptitudes of a leader, in both technical areas and general management competencies. Integrity is the extent to which a leader is seen to adhere to accepted principles. Benevolence is the extent to which a leader is perceived to want to do good to the followers; to be considerate of the follower’s needs and interests. Benevolence and integrity are aspects of the leader’s character which require time to judge [20]. All the union leaders interviewed did not feel that the CEO possessed all three attributes even after he had held the position for a decade.

3. Trust must be mutual

There is an inevitable destructive potential in the presence of distrust in organisations in that both management and employees and their representatives think that motives and intentions are sinister. The parties, therefore, make efforts to reduce their vulnerability and protect their interests, which encourages a competitive atmosphere.

Organisational success depends on mutual trust. Unfortunately, this may be lacking in most organisations because trust is risky; risky because it involves an element of vulnerability. Vulnerability means openness to be physically or emotionally hurt or wounded. Dr. David DeSteno says, “The heart of trust is vulnerability. There’s something that you need to acquire or achieve, and you need help to do it, but by accepting that help, you make yourself vulnerable” (Weir, 2013).⁵ This is a challenge for both employers and employees and their representatives if they are to achieve organisational goals. Building trust requires both parties to take the risk and accept the vulnerability that goes with trust; otherwise, an organisation remains in the tit-for-tat situation which affects performance and morale negatively. During all the times people are at work, cooperation and communication are loaded with risks and likely betrayal. Feelings of betrayal, no matter how small or subtle, lead to distrust. Much as we all try to avoid risks and protect ourselves, we need to choose to trust others at work.

The onus is on the leadership of both management and unions to bring about mutual trust in organisations. They need to honestly assess themselves and ask: “Do the people I lead trust me?” DeSteno further says “the potential benefits from trusting others considerably outweigh the potential losses on average.”⁶ Leaders need to accept that success is with and through those they lead, hence the need to earn their trust.

Where trust has been lost, it cannot be built overnight. It takes time and effort and must be evidenced by walking the talk, effective communication and listening to others, shared decision making, team work, rewarding and acknowledging good performance, accepting blame, fairness in all dealings and putting a value on good relationships. Organisational change is difficult but not impossible when the parties are willing to change and encourage psychological comfort at the workplace where more time is spent than in their homes.

Of course, there is always the inevitable situation where jobs are difficult to find resulting in those in employment finding it difficult to criticise authority even in the face of glaring distrust and inequity, for fear of losing their jobs. Such employees revert to boot licking and bad-mouthing colleagues in the hope of advancing their careers. Instead of building trust, such situations build distrust.

4. The soft human resource management approach in building trust

According to Mayer et al. [19], trust is “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective to the ability to monitor or control that other party.” Trust is therefore a psychological state in which a party accepts vulnerability based on the positive expectations of the trustee. In employment relations trust and trustworthiness reveal an underlying antagonistic union-employer relationship.

Features of the human resource management approach to industrial relations include that:

• It views organisational development from a psychological perspective;

• Focus is on the positive nature that is found in all employees and management;

• Management has an open-door policy—thus the need for unions lobbying for changes is unnecessary because the SHRM approach emphasises engaging specialised industrial relations practitioners in the human resource department to handle employee relations matters.

• Assumes that managers listen to the needs and concerns of employees. It is an assumption because this may not necessarily be the case for all managers.

The challenge here is whether human resource practitioners are equipped with the skills to execute these features to foster trust in organisations. An expansion of this approach is the Soft Human Resource Management approach (SHRM).

This paper would like to suggest that Soft Human Resource Management⁷ (SHRM) an approach where mutual trust exists, offers an ideal and effective management system for organisational performance. SHRM can be compared with McGregor’s Theory Y assumptions that: employees enjoy their work and will be committed to the organisation if they are trusted, trained and developed, and work autonomously. Soft HRM (or the Harvard Model), advanced by Beer et al. [21], Walton [22] and Bailey et al. [23] lists the key features of soft human resource management which foster trust between management and employees as follows:

4.1 Key features of soft human resource management

Treating employees as the organisation’s most important assets

Employees are key to long-term business strategies

HR department integrates employee’s needs into long-term organisational strategies

Focuses on how employees are rewarded and recognised for their performance

Focuses on how employees are motivated to be actively engaged in achieving company strategy, mission and values

Empowers employees by encouraging them to take responsibility for their roles

Encourages open communication between management and employees

Employees skills are developed

From the worker’s point of view, Vroom’s Expectancy Theory can be applied here, which holds that employees will be motivated when they believe that they can achieve certain goals and that once these goals are achieved they will receive valued rewards. It is a sub-conscious assessment based on “the perceived trustworthiness of organisations and their leaders in honouring the social contracts that govern organisational relationships” ([24], p. 158).

SHRM aims to bring about efficiency, profit maximisation and committed employees. Unions are also interested in these goals for the welfare of their members. This can be seen as compatibility between the two, much as trade unions adversarial strength of bargaining power may be seen to weaken. De Silva (1998) states that, “HRM is not per se anti-union and its central themes are not necessarily inconsistent with unionism.” Although SHRM does not focus on collective bargaining in the way industrial relations do, collective bargaining involves all mechanisms brought in to reach a consensus between trade unions and employers. When viewed in this way conflict is reduced and compatibility meets requirements, promoting human capacity building and sustainable productivity. What is required is cooperative unionism since both SHRM and trade unionism require employees’ loyalty—this confirms compatibility [25].

SHRM sounds appealing but requires research into its feasibility in Zambia. This is a limitation of the study.

5. Conclusion

Although trust may be a desirable resource, it is often fragile, elusive and difficult to cultivate [26]. For both employers and employees and their representatives, it is important to firstly recognise the presence of distrust and trace the origins. Both parties should also be willing to take the risk of trusting each other despite the vulnerability involved. Accepting this risk should considerably reduce the perpetual conflict and unnecessary suspicions about each other’s motives and intentions in their activities and decisions. Unions would do well to organise workshops on conflict resolution and how to handle distrust. Organisations should consider employing the soft human resource management approach to enhance trust in employee relations. With this approach people can evolve from the ‘suspicious still’ to get to ‘trust still’ stage. As English concludes in the trust diagram, “People at the positive top of the trust diagram are generally more successful in life than those on the bottom. Part of this is that you often need to trust colleagues to have them perform at their highest levels.”

Thanks

Most of the data for this paper were gathered from interviews with workmates. I wish to thank all the people that participated in the preparation of the paper. They wish to remain anonymous but I particularly thank the unnamed CEO, the union leaders and the many workmates who willingly gave their thoughts and ideas on how trust can be cultivated in a work environment.