Yet despite these reform efforts, corporate trust violations have gone unabated and public trust in business has plummeted.2 A full recitation of the significant trust violations of recent years would go on for pages, covering Olympus Corporation’s accounting fraud, Barclays’ LIBOR rigging scandal, News Corporation’s phone-hacking scandal, and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In fact, some of the most insidious practices from the Enron era (notably, disguising financial weakness with off-balance-sheet debt) were front and center again during the global financial crisis of 2008. In the wake of that financial crisis, the U.S. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which extended and tightened the financial regulatory system and strengthened consumer protections. But the apparent inability of governments and industry groups to curb the level of wrongdoing raises important questions: Why do trust failures continue to occur with such frequency, and how can they be reliably prevented?
The matter is all the more perplexing considering that there is substantial research on organizational trust, including what trust is, how trust affects the functioning of organizations and how trust can be built, lost and repaired.3 Much of the work supports commonsense notions about how leaders can and should earn the trust of followers. One of us (Robert Hurley) developed the framework below to help leaders understand how to earn trust.4 It effectively summarizes the empirical evidence regarding trust drawn from several decades of research in fields including psychology, game theory, organizational behavior and sociology, identifying six types of signals people consider when deciding whether to trust a person, group or organization (a “trustee”):
- Common values: Does the trustee share our values and beliefs?
- Aligned interests: Do the trustee’s interests coincide rather than conflict with ours?
- Benevolence: Does the trustee care about our welfare?
- Competence: Is the trustee capable of delivering on commitments?
- Predictability and integrity: Does the trustee abide by commonly accepted ethical standards (such as honesty and fairness), and is he or she predictable?
- Communication: Does the trustee listen and engage in open and mutual dialogue?
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