Contemporary management goes beyond individual organizations. The increasing frequency of international encounters has led to crises of greater complexity and variety. Sorting out and solving these crises requires fundamental trust, which is a very fragile component of organizational interactions. Trust is difficult to establish and sustain, but it can be destroyed very easily. People create expectations about others, believing that they will behave in a way that is beneficial and not harmful for the parties in an interaction. Trust is a very important part of social and organizational life, especially in situations where the trustor depends on the trustee’s future actions to achieve her or his own goals and objectives. This is of great importance in managing public organizations. The necessity of establishing conditions of creating public trust is becoming omnipresent (Denhardt 2011; Lane 2009). Thus, trust must be taken into account in the operations of any public organization.
Some researchers have described public trust as “an important goal of governmental organisations” (Feldheim and Wang 2004, p. 63). However, this seems to be a too narrow definition of trust. A deep examination into the literature of the field indicates that trust is a means to achieve the goals of public organizations, not the end goal itself. There is also a view that the public trust experienced in all situations can be defined as social capital, which enhances problem solving, reduces conflicts, and enables more satisfying relationships (Fukuyama 1995; Carnevale 1995). That approach seems to be too wide when research revolves around the organizational perspective of public trust. Some aspects of this perspective can be traced in the works of researchers such as Bourdieu (2008) and Putnam et al. (1993). Bourdieu (2008, p. 248) referred correctly to social capital as the “aggregate of actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network or more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance of recognition,” whereas Putnam et al. (1993, p. 167) emphasized the “features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks”. Therefore, according to these authors, trust is a feature of an organization: in the case of a public organization, this feature remains to be public trust. Today, more and more frequently, people share an opinion that public trust is the glue that holds a given democracy together. However, from the perspective of our research, this seems to be too general.
Other authors have proposed a highly meticulous approach to trust (Llewellyn et al. 2013; Hardin 2006), with a distinction between trust and confidence. For instance, Hardin wrote about a meaningful distinction between these phenomena, claiming that public confidence may be more linked to indications of good performance, whereas trust is more driven by perceptions of public integrity and shared values. At the same time, he stressed that trust and confidence are interwoven. Thus, both of these concepts can be analyzed jointly in the discussions on confidence as a subcomponent of trust.
The literature in the field offers some attempts to explain the essence of public trust. A compilation of the main indicators of public trust listed good governance as one of them (Bouckaert and Van de Wall 2003a). The same authors connected the notion of public trust with “citizens’ perceptions of their government, and of their administration more specifically” (Bouckaert and Van de Walle 2003b, p. 303). An interesting way of understanding public trust was provided by Bouckaert (2012) who distinguished three types of trust: (1) the trust of citizens and organizations in government and the public sector; (2) the trust of government and the public sector in citizens and organizations; (3) trust within government and the public sector.
In this book, public trust is understood as a type of organizational trust (Kożuch and Dobrowolski 2014) that takes into consideration the specificity of managing public organizations. It is related to the belief that the organizational objectives of public bodies, their competences, shared norms and values, organizational principles, processes and procedures, codes of conduct, and attention to the interests of workers and citizens lead to the adoption of policies and public programs that serve the public interest and represent citizens.
We think that creating a trust-enhancing organizational context has become one of the most important analyses of public trust (Six 2004). Furthermore, we fully share a view that trust has to be built and managed (Klijn and Eshuis 2013). We claim that trust has a crucial role to play when public organizations aim at innovations and successful operations or to pave the way to the next public service generation (Harisalo and Stenvall 2004; Heichlinger and Vanebo 2013). The purpose of this book is to bring together the theory and practice of managing public trust. The book is divided into five parts, as follows.
Part 1: Trust and Public Trust: Background and Definitions
Part 1 contains two chapters that cover the concept of trust and public trust. The first chapter presents the concept of trust as a multifaceted notion based on critical literature review. In this chapter, the definitions of trust are presented. Next, the types, dimensions, and roles of trust in management are described. The second chapter provides a framework for interpreting the specificity of trust in public organizations in the context of concepts of publicness, particularly the linkage of public trust and effectiveness of public organizations, as well as the processes of creating, regaining, and sustaining public trust in public organizations. This chapter reports on the current state of knowledge about public trust and helps to further a deeper understanding of creating public trust within and between organizations.
Part 2: Organizational Challenges and Public Trust
Part 2 contains five chapters explaining the relationship of public trust with different organizational activities. It includes a description of the relationship between public trust and aspects of organizing and managing activities such as organizational change, organizational learning, human resource management, and strategic partnership. Chapter 5 is devoted to the issue of building and maintaining trust in academic institutions, as illustrated by the example of Poland. Chapter 6 discusses how to manage human resource processes to develop and maintain a high level of trust as an element of social capital. In Chap. 7, the concept of trust in organizations is dissected and analyzed within the framework of national culture. The aim of Chap. 8 is to clarify and explore trust, partnership, and dynamic capabilities.
Part 3: The Development of Public Trust
Part 3 contains two chapters. In Chap. 9, the authors present the impact of social media on the development of public trust. Public trust is analyzed in three dimensions—competence, benevolence, and integrity—in an example of communication via Twitter during a participative budgeting process in Poland’s voivodships. Chapter 10 presents the relationship between public service design and public trust management in the context of ensuring the continuity of public trust-based organizations. It is particularly important to pay attention to the criteria of this continuity with regard to the various interpretations of the sustainability concept. The scope of the chapter includes the principles of building a concept of sustainable management with respect to ethics, economics, and ecology toward meeting the expectations of stakeholders in public organizations.
Part 4: The Dynamics of Public Trust in Organizational Cooperation
Part 4 contains three chapters. The authors of Chap. 11 describe the results of research conducted in Finland that is related to mutual trust. Chapter 12 uses the game theory to introduce and explain how information asymmetry among members of the society and differences between the interests of the partners influence public trust. The last chapter in this part covers the aspects of trust in integrated territorial investment projects.
Part 5: Public Trust in Different Countries
Part 5 contains four chapter in which the meaning of public trust is presented from different cultural perspectives. Chapter 14 provides an overview of the meaning of trust, the studies on trust, and trustworthy behaviors in Turkish culture. In next chapter, the authors describe four cases to demonstrate the characteristics of relevance, psychology, risk, goodwill, and decision-making of public trust in Taiwan. In Chap. 16, an example from Poland is presented. The authors present trust as a vital instrument that enables collaboration between different parties engaged in complex planning processes. Chapter 17 presents an overview of the relationship between intellectual capital indicators and trust in the public administration of European countries. In other words, it highlights the empirical evidence that countries with better indicators of trust are also those with better intellectual capital management.
Overall, this book...