Employee trust repair in the context of organizational change – identification and measurement of active trust repair practices

Abstract

Organizational trust is positively related with employee job satisfaction, firm performance and productivity. However, the current disrupted work environment with unpredictable changes is challenging for employee trust. Today, employee trust repair is more relevant than ever due to the uncertainty which continuous changes bring to our lives. Active trust repair can be seen as a mean through which organizations may operate to protect trust and pursue even better trust outcomes. Therefore, there is a high relevant need to understand how different active trustrepair practices can repair violated trust and which of them are the most effective in the change context and in company-specific situations.

The objective of this study is to respond to identified research gaps and to identify active trust-repair practices especially in the change context. The study focuses on intraorganizational trust repair. It suggests that the trust repair process in where first, the trust violations are identified, second, the necessary trust repairing practices are implemented in an organization and, finally, the effectiveness of the trust-repair practices used are measured among employees by using the developed trust-repair scale (TRS). This study was conducted using mixed methods comprised of an extensive systematic review, a qualitative case study with 22 informants, and a quantitative survey with 383 respondents, and a qualitative– quantitative mixed-methods approach was applied in order to development the validated scale.

Through the findings of four individual publications, trust repair practices were identified and a multiphase trust repair process was completed. A high level of trust within an organization requires continuous and active trust-building. This means that the best trust-repair practices and patterns of behaviour are used continuously in the organization and a feedback survey with TRS is repeated on a regular basis. The study offers several contributions to the trust repair literature and provides practical information from a real work context and can improve managers’ understanding of active trust repair practices. This dissertation makes a significant practical contribution to enabling organizations to gain real tools to implement trust building and repairing in organizations. The novelty contribution of this dissertation relates to discussion on the active trust repair especially by demonstrating integrated trust repair practices and the validated scale for measure them.