Cultural Factors of Trust in a Public Organization as a Workplace, [w:] Managing Public Trust

Cultural Factors of Trust in a Public Organization as a Workplace

Perry and Mankin (2007) have discovered that a lot of employees hold increasingly negative views of their organizations. Four out of five employees are suspicious of their management (Lazarus and Salem 2005). A similar appraisal was offered by Reina and Reina (1999), who suggested that organizational trust has been at its lowest level since the construct has been measured. Most of the increasing distrust in organizations can be traced to some highly visible scandals that have affected both the public and private sectors in recent years (Tzafrir 2005). In the private sector, occurrences that involved Worldcom, Tyco, Enron, and Arthur Andersen serve as a reminder of the types of events and institutions necessary for the widely circulated dissolution of trust among the general public (Pillmore 2003; Gledhill 2003; Zekany et al. 2004; Conroy and Emerson 2006). Hayden (2008) stated that some scandals have happened in higher education institutions where degradation in the level of trusts has been recorded. From the perspective of an internal organization, similar research has insinuated that some variables related to an employee’s view of a work environment could affect the employee’s perception of trust in the organization’s research (Williams 2005; Hubbell and Chory-Assad 2005; Ellis and Shockley-Zalabak 2001). This chapter evaluates organizational trust in the context of culture with many of the following variables: interpersonal conflict, resistance to change, empowerment, demographics, and support for innovation, as noted in the literature.