Trust lubricates wheels of forward-looking ventures

As an employee, you must trust that your boss will not seek to sack you for doing your job well. Otherwise, you spend all your time searching for other employment. FILE 

By SCOTT BELLOWS

In Summary

• If citizens do not trust that even if their candidate loses, they will have another fair chance to elect politicians in the future who represent their interest, then a democratic society collapses.

This August, many Kenyans on social media are abuzz about the upcoming visit later this month of popular author Stephen R. Covey to discuss one of his books, the Speed of Trust, originally published in 2006.

Business Talk has highlighted organisational trust and its vital importance regularly since 2013 based on research conducted at USIU also since 2006.

Brilliant marketers, like Covey, package the below and other research and put them into catchy titles, phrases, and easy to understand and implementable steps.

It is exciting that this vital organisational construct is receiving deserved attention here in Kenya.

If we look around us, social uncertainty abounds. As managers of our families, offices, churches, charities, or government, how do we make decisions while only holding incomplete information?

We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We do not know how colleagues will react to our actions. We do not know if a boss will lash out over an uncomplimentary report.

Famous researcher Denise Rousseau and her team defined trust in 1998 as a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behaviour on another. Kenyans on Twitter rightly refer to trust as the lubricant that makes businesses function.

Researcher Robert Putnam coined the concept back in 1993 of trust acting as the social fabric lubricant that mediates interpersonal relationships within organisations.

In fact, Putnam even went further by stating that trust even serves as the lubricant that makes democracy work.

If citizens do not trust that even if their candidate loses, they will have another fair chance to elect politicians in the future who represent their interest, then a democratic society collapses.

Another researcher, Roderick Kramer, explains that people in an organisation utilise trust to fill in the gaps when they have incomplete information about a decision or another person.

Trust

As an employee, you must trust that your boss will not seek to sack you for doing your job well. Otherwise, you spend all your time searching for other employment.

Humans go through a three stage process when building trust: belief, decision, and action. First, an employee must believe that they can be vulnerable and take a risk on their bosses and co-workers.

Second, the employee must make a mental decision that they will trust. Third and finally, the employee must act on their decision in order to hold real trust.

Suppose that you strongly dislike your current job. You discuss your displeasure with your manager.

Your manager states that they cannot relocate you to a different department for another six months. However, you have another job offer at another firm that expires in two weeks.

Do you trust your current boss and wait six months to see if he or she will transfer you as promised? Or, do you distrust your boss and quit the firm to take the other opportunity? Your answer will determine on what degree of trust you regard your supervisor and whether you act on it.

Culturally, here in Africa, we take longer to pass through the three stages of trust. In the Western context, the speed at which an employee trusts occurs much faster.

Westerners, more than Africans, tend to trust based on early perceptions of others and then lose trust in other people once they are disappointed by them. Sub-Saharan Africans, on the other hand, do not trust until we test the other person and make absolutely positively sure that they will not harm us in the future.

Important points leading up to Covey’s visit include: latest research shows that Sub-Saharan Africans build trust differently from Westerns.
Ways that Westerners psychologically utilise to build trust faster works exactly opposite in many ways from here in Africa.

The most celebrated researchers in trust in the world, Roger Mayer, James Davis, and David Schoorman discovered that most cultures trust their managers and coworkers based on whether they perceive that they have the ability to do their jobs, have goodwill or benevolence towards employees, and keep high integrity.

Bosses who demonstrate these traits speed up trust decisions by employees in the company. The research has been validated in North America, Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. However, here in Africa, research shows exactly the opposite.

Employees do not like working for a boss with high ability. African workers prefer bosses with lower skill sets, otherwise they quit organisations at much higher rates.

In order to highlight this new research, as a non-profit institution, USIU plans a CSR community outreach to Business Daily readers who are business executives and aspiring business leaders on August 17 for two sessions, one at 1pm and another at 6pm at USIU Africa, behind Safari Park Hotel.

Details from the public lectures and simulations will be discussed the following week in the Business Daily.

The sessions will include an organisational trust simulation, materials, and discussions on how to build trust in an African context and how Western methods of trust formation cause your employees to perform worse.

The first 50 respondents to RSVP who mention Business Daily in their email receive free admission. Discuss organisational trust with other Business Daily readers through #SpeedOfTrustKe on Twitter.

Scott may be reached on scott@ScottProfessor.com or follow on Twitter: @ScottProfessor.