Leadership Trust

12 Key excerpts on "Leadership Trust"

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  Communication, Leadership and Trust in Organizations

  • Joanna Paliszkiewicz, José L. Guerrero Cusumano, Joanna Paliszkiewicz, José L. Guerrero Cusumano(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Wong et al., 2000 ).

  Trust significantly affects organizational leadership (Mishra & Mishra, 2013 ). The development of leadership skills is associated with a leader characterized by openness, friendliness, dependability, and capability (Ballinger et al., 2009 ). Earlier studies have noted various important attributes of trust, including transparency, openness, reliability, honesty, dependability, congruence, ability/competence, communication, benevolence, and consistency (Koohang et al., 2017 ; Paliszkiewicz et al., 2015 ).

  6.2.2 Leadership

  Researchers have been interested in studying leadership for many years (Bass & Stogdill, 1990 ; Karaszewski, 2008 ; Schein, 1992 ). Despite this attention, pinning down a clear definition of what leadership is has proven to be a challenging task. While there are numerous proposed definitions of leadership in the literature, there is no single definition that is widely accepted or comprehensive. Indeed, efforts to define leadership illustrate just how complicated and vague the concept can be (Karaszewski, 2008 ).

  Throughout history, leadership has been perceived as a character trait that arises from a good upbringing Silva (2016 ). Drucker (1996 ) argued that leaders are people who have followers, while Schein (1992 ) defines leadership as the ability to move beyond culture and promote more adaptable evolutionary change processes. Finally, Garner (1993

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  Perspectives on Leadership

  From the Science of Management to Its Spiritual Heart

  • Gilbert W. Fairholm(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  92 Trust Leadership situation. Without trust the individual has no power in relationships, no control over other people not actually in sight. Trust is central to empowerment, expectation and predictability. Without at least some assurance that information, actions or events are real, trust is ex- tremely risky. We build our lives on trust relationships. Our actions apply trust or its lack in everything we do or say. We trust others to obey basic traffic rules. We trust stores to honor our credit cards. We trust maintenance people to repair our appliances. All aspects of the working relationship, our corporate work cultures, are based on trust of others—superiors, peers, subordinates, customers and other stakeholders. Trust or its lack is at the heart of many of the problems society pres- ents to the thoughtful observer. Much of social culture today is frag- mented and conflict-ridden. Leadership in this kind of environment requires adherence to ethical principles that highlight trust (Maccoby, 1981). This kind of principle-based society is missing today. Sadly, peo- ple appear to have lost confidence in their leaders and in the programs that they lead. We have lost the sense of community that former cultures provided. Now people are together, but as individuals, not as a community. Many of our business organizations and even some of our families lack the cohesion that mutual trust provides. One result is that many people suffer from isolation, anomie and anxiety. Unless workers trust not only the leaders' motives, but also their ability to lead, they will not follow (Hitt, 1988). In the past, reliance on structural form or workflow processes has done something to improve efficiency. This focus alone largely ignores the socio-psychological dimensions of corporate life. Yet, it is in this socio-psychological dimension of team interrelationships that we can find the solution to many contemporary problems.

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  Leadership and the Culture of Trust

  • Gilbert W. Fairholm(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The risk is always The Leadership of Trust 97 present in trusting others or in relying on given systems or policies or procedures or specific structural forms that they will not behave as ex- pected. In essence when we trust another person, event, or thing, we agree to rely on the authenticity of that person, event, or thing. In theory, we do not need to trust in situations of absolute knowledge of the truth of a given person, action, or event. In these cases, there is no risk, we know. Such absolute knowledge, however, is rarely present in most organizations. Leaders rarely can rely on this level of mutual understanding of the reality of a situation; hence, the need for cultures that support a high degree of trust. We define trust in chapter 8 as reliance on the integrity, or authenticity, of other people. It is a logical, thoughtful hope in their reality, their authenticity, their truth. Trust becomes both an expectation and a per- sonal obligation to be authentic, trustworthy, and reliable, which is prov- able by ensuing experience. Seen in this light, trust is one of the values supporting a given culture that helps define how and in what degree members value others. Trust places obligation on both the truster and the person in whom we place our trust. It is the foundation of success in any interpersonal relationship. While organizational theory assumes, but largely ignores the idea of trust, nevertheless, it is integral to that set of interpersonal relationships. Trust implies proactivity. When we trust another we act toward that person with assurance, even when we do not have all needed or desired information about them. With trust we can function in an otherwise un- known, ambiguous, even risky, situation. With trust we can take control of a situation or circumstance. Without trust the individual has no power in relationships, no control over other people not actually in sight. Trust is central to cultural ideas of empowerment, expectation, and predictability.

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  A Contemporary Look at Business Ethics

  • Ronald R. Sims(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Families depend on the responsible decisions of organizational leaders. At the core of all business decisions are moral and ethical principles. Failure to clearly state and support and withhold high ethical standards has consequences like the loss of trust in the organiza- tion’s leaders. As we look to the future it is important that leaders recognize that they have a responsibility for creating trust and cultivating cultural values. Lead- ers are the most important and powerful influence on the culture of an or- ganization and are responsible for creating credibility and trust. Research has suggested that the most important element for leadership, in general, is the ability to engender trust. 36 Additional behaviors and skills critical for effective leadership are ethics, 37 the ability to build relationships and en- hance collaboration, 38 and treat individuals as unique, 39 among others. Trust is something that organizations and their leaders will need to con- tinue to earn as we look to the future and one way of doing this is to expect leaders to model values-based leadership as discussed in the next section. Modeling values-based leadership is a start to building ongoing trust between an organization’s leaders and various stakeholders and cultures of character. Ethics in Business  531 Setting the Tone at the Top: Nothing Less Than Values- Based Leadership Throughout this book we have noted concerns about moral or ethical lead- ership issues. Wells Fargo, Volkswagen, FIFA, the Catholic Church, and many other organizations continue to create a “Who’s Who” list of organi- zations with highly questionable leadership. It appears that leaders of vari- ous government, religious, and educational entities made decisions based on short-term individual gain rather than long-term collective benefit. As these problems continue to gain attention and scrutiny, there will be increased calls for more moral or ethical leaders as we move further and further into this century.

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  International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2011, Volume 26

  • Gerard P. Hodgkinson, J. Kevin Ford, Gerard P. Hodgkinson, J. Kevin Ford(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  To be able to exert such influence effectively and without the need for constant monitoring or for forceful coercion, trust between leaders and followers seems crucial. The GLOBE study, which focused on cultural differences in implicit leadership theories, suggests several trust-related qualities universally endorsed as important for leaders; for example, in all 60 countries involved in this study, an outstanding leader was expected to be a confidence builder, good at team building and communicating, who is decisive and intelligent as well as trustworthy, just, and honest (Den Hartog, House, Hanges, et al., 1999; House, Hanges, Hanges, et al., 2004). Trust in leaders has positive effects within organizations. For example, in a study of restaurants, Davis, Schoorman, Mayer, et al. (2000) found that employees’ trust in the general manager of their restaurant was related to improved financial performance and reduced employee turnover. Similarly, in their study in a service context, Grant and Sumanth (2009) showed that trust in leaders was positively related to employees’ prosocial motivation and behavior. In their meta-analytical review, Dirks and Ferrin (2002) found that trust in leaders was positively related to enhanced job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, commitment, satisfaction, and reduced turn-over intentions. Although to some extent trust in leaders may be role-based i.e., trust in the leader based not on person-specific knowledge about their capabilities or intentions, but on the role or office they hold and their training or background in that role (e.g., Kramer, 1999), the leader’s personal characteristics and actions are also likely to affect trust. Leader’s trustworthiness in the eyes of followers relies on the intentions that followers attribute to the leader (e.g., benevolence and integrity versus malevolence and dishonesty) and the leader’s perceived competence and ability (i.e., the extent to which the leader is seen as capable)

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  Simple Truths of Leadership

  52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust

  • Ken Blanchard, Randy Conley(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Berrett-Koehler Publishers

    (Publisher)

  S ome leaders charge headlong into setting strategies and goals for their teams without giving much thought to building trust. Yet trust is the foundation of any successful, healthy relationship. When you have the trust of your team, all things are possible. Creativity, innovation, productivity, efficiency, and morale flourish. If your team doesn’t trust you, you get resistance, disengagement, apathy, and, ultimately, failure.

  The most successful leaders realize their number one priority is to build trust with their team. Trustworthy leaders demonstrate competence in their roles, act with integrity, show care and concern for team members, and honor their commitments by following through on their promises.

  MAKING COMMON SENSE COMMON PRACTICE

  Does your team perceive you as trustworthy? If you’re not sure, ask them. Here are a few sample questions: • Do you have confidence in my leadership/management abilities? Where or how can I improve? • Do I walk my talk? Where can I be more consistent in my behavior? • How well do I listen to you? Do our interactions leave you feeling heard, valued, and supported? • Am I dependable? Do you trust that I’ll follow through on my commitments? Demonstrating your vulnerability by having a discussion with your people about trust is a powerful way to introduce servant leadership in your workplace. Passage contains an image

  SIMPLE TRUTH #28 Building trust is a skill that can be learned and developed.

  I n my work, I have found that people have a common misconception about trust. Many people believe trust just happens, through some sort of relationship osmosis. The truth is that building trust is a skill. And, as with any skill, we can learn it and become better at it with practice. Since trust is either built or eroded by the behaviors we choose to use, we can enjoy more trust in our relationships when we use the right kind of behaviors.

  MAKING COMMON SENSE COMMON PRACTICE

  In the book Trust Works!

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  Culture and Trust in Technology-Driven Organizations

  • Frances Alston(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Culture determines behaviors that bond, motivate, and set the stage for trust to be cultivated and flourish. In order to gain an understanding of the importance of creating trusting cultures in an organizational setting, it is necessary to understand the role leadership plays in developing or forming and maintaining these cultures. Building trust within an organi-zation starts at the top of the organization. Leadership is the most impor-tant factor in facilitating and maintaining credence and confidence. One of the most difficult aspects of building a competitive team and organization is managing the culture because values, principles, and practices are not easily recognized and managed. The way in which poli-cies are implemented and the behavior of leaders can provide an indica-tion of whether the culture of an organization is perceived to be based on trust or fear. Fear-based cultures produce members who are not will-ing to take chances and therefore creativity is stifled for fear of failure and the retribution that may occur in the event of that failure. Leaders 95 Chapter eight: Tactics for building and maintaining trust © 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC must invest the time and energy in building a culture that can serve as a springboard to ensuring organizational success. We all agree that build-ing cultures that encompass elements such as trust, productivity, cre-ativity, employee involvement, and so on is not easy, however, they are necessary for competing in a changing global environment. 8.8 Perils of mistrust In many environments it seems to be easier for mistrust to develop. Mistrust has a serious negative impact on the attitudes of people and their willingness to buy into the vision and values of the organization. Generally mistrust develops in an organizational setting as a result of the actions of managers, the policies that are developed, and the way those policies are implemented.

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  The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave

  How to Recognize the Subtle Signs and Act Before It's Too Late

  • Leigh Branham(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • AMACOM

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TEN Reason #7: Loss of Trust andConfidence in Senior Leaders Business begins with trust. . . . As companies abandonbureaucratic mechanisms, their leaders need tounderstand that trust is as important to managementas it is to relationships with customers.

  —WARREN BENNIS

  Having reviewed so many issues and practices that lie mostly within the sphere of managers to control or influence, we now consider the special challenge facing senior leaders—to create a culture of trust and integrity that strengthens the bonds of employee engagement. While this challenge is shared by all managers and every employee, it is incumbent on senior leaders to set the tone and the example.

  The consulting firm Towers-Watson, which evaluates a company’s employment brand by its share performance, reported that companies with high trust levels outperform companies with low trust levels by 186 percent.1 Towers-Watson’s Global Workforce Study of 4 million workers, released in 2010, asked respondents to name the five characteristics they desired in senior leaders. The most-desired trait by far was “trustworthiness” (followed by “cares about others’ well-being,” “encourages development of talent,” “highly visible to employees,” and “manages financial performance successfully”). However, when asked whether they agree that their companies’ leaders are trustworthy, only 47 percent of American respondents agreed. Certainly the economy has played a role in dimming employees’ view of senior leaders.2

  If the bonds of trust between employees and senior leaders are weak, even the best efforts of gifted middle managers will not be enough to attract, engage, and keep the people needed for the business to achieve its goals. The direct managers themselves are less likely to be effective at engaging employees when they don’t trust their leaders, as well.

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  The Learning Advantage

  Six Practices of Learning-Directed Leadership

  • D. Christopher Kayes, Anna Kayes(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The reaction of Robert’s staff is quite common; trust seems to be lacking in many workplaces. The challenges of building trust Given the importance of trust, there is still a surprising lack of trust reported in organizations. A 2001 Gallup poll reported that only 41 percent of Americans said most people could be trusted. Nearly 80 percent polled did not trust top executives. A 2005 Gallup poll found that only 16 percent of Americans ranked honesty and ethical standards of business executives as high or very high. These studies imply that leaders looking to build trust face a difficult task. 8 NURTURING TRUST 157 Trust includes many different things. Leaders who nurture trust can be relied on, and they promote learning through an open and accepting environment. As a result, individuals feel they can bring up tough issues, reflect on solutions while placing personal agendas aside, and openly discuss weaknesses of the team, and surface problems or errors that may arise. One leader we know begins his weekly meetings by asking his team to talk about mistakes they made during the past week and how they can improve. The sessions prove more than a gripe session. All team members take seriously the notion that they will be expected to openly identify their weakness. More importantly, team members know they will be responsible for helping other team members overcome their mistakes and problems. The leader is consistent with what Alan Fox (1974), a noted British industrial sociologist, has said about trust and leadership. Fox explained trust from a microsociological perspective. First, trust is reciprocal in nature. If one team member trusts another, then other members are more likely to trust each other. On the other hand, if team members mistrust each other, then in turn others will be mistrustful. Second, trust does not know neutrality—there is only trust or distrust in the workplace. Unfortunately, in our work, we have seen many more examples of distrust than trust.

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  The Strategic Project Leader

  Mastering Service-Based Project Leadership, Second Edition

  • Jack Ferraro(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Auerbach Publications

    (Publisher)

  175 15 Trust-Based Relationships INTRODUCTION Developing trust is a core competency of leaders, and service-based project leaders are no exception. Failures of project leadership are nor-mally accompanied by a breakdown of trust. Trust is an emotionally charged topic and has various interpretations. Trust has many dimen-sions: trust of others, trust of self, integrity, competence, and communi-cation. Project environmental characteristics create a mutual need for a fiduciary relationship between customers and project teams, sponsors and project leaders, and team members and leaders—and even between team members quickly. The challenge is that the project environment charac-teristics of temporariness, ambiguous hierarchies, changing work teams, and heterogeneity of team members hamper trust and create difficulties in developing group cohesiveness, coordination, and communication. 1 For this fiduciary relationship to be legitimate, it must grow from mutual respect and a common understanding. The absence of trust creates underperforming project teams guided by self-preservation and defense mechanisms. Perceptive stakeholders sense this dysfunction and aim their “project death bullets” at the project. Naive customers allow substantial investments to be wasted and eventually con-vince themselves that any output from the project is better than none at all. Trust-based relationships must be mutual. They require active par-ticipation by both the service-based project leader and the stakeholder. 2 To engage in a trust-based relationship, the trusting party must recog-nize value. These relationships are sought after by many project managers but only develop for those who can demonstrate a need for the relation-ship. A service-based project leader must demonstrate ample reason why a team member, customer, sponsor, or critical project stakeholder should 176 • The Strategic Project Leader even consider entering into this relationship.

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  Trust Matters

  For Organisational and Personal Success

  • S. Bibb, J. Kourdi(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  61 People look for reasons why they cannot trust the leader more than for reasons why they can. Most leaders would probably say that trust is important. If you could bottle it, they would probably buy it! However, few think about it very much or do anything to consciously achieve it. There are many reasons for this. Most people do not think about it too much. Some take it for granted, and when they do consider it they feel that trust probably exists for the most part, so there is no need to focus on it.When it is present, leaders do not tend to attribute success to trust. In fact, its existence as a vital ingredient for organisational suc- cess is often invisible to leaders. Some think that it is very difficult to do anything about, so they do not even try. Others see no other way than to run their organisations using power rather than trust. In this chapter, we examine what trusted leaders do, high- lighting examples of what leaders have achieved by building trust in their organisations. YOU’VE GOT TO GIVE TO GET There is a story of a manager at General Motors in the USA who turned round the worst performing plant in the company to one that was an exemplar of productivity and quality. She did it through involving the employees and showing trust in them. They were suspicious of her at first and did not do the things that they had agreed to do in their numerous discussions about how to improve productivity. When this happened she confronted them openly and talked of how they had betrayed the trust that she had shown in them. But she continued to trust them. This happened several times. Eventually they started to realise that she did have expecta- tions and trusted them to keep their commitments. The plant’s perfor- mance improved to the point where the decision to close it down was reversed by senior management. 5 How leaders build trust She achieved this astonishing result because she continued to trust them after they initially failed to honour their commitments.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Leadership

  • Alan Bryman, David Collinson, Keith Grint, Brad Jackson, Mary Uhl-Bien, Alan Bryman, David Collinson, Keith Grint, Brad Jackson, Mary Uhl-Bien(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In concluding, I want to emphasize that throughout this chapter I have consistently emphasized trust in the con-text of leadership processes rather than trust in leaders per se. This distinction, in my view, is not simply stylistic but essential. As Hackman and Wageman (2005) have compellingly argued, the leadership literature has been hampered by what they term the leadership attribution error . As a mere consequence of their high visibility and salience in most social and organizational situa-tions, they argue, individual leaders attract a disproportionate share of the causal credit or blame for good and bad outcomes. Hackman and Wageman characterize this leadership attribution error as ‘understandable, persuasive, and quite powerful’ (p. 39) in its impact on how both con-stituents and leaders make sense of, and respond to, the various situations they confront. In recog-nition of the importance of their argument, I have endeavored throughout this chapter to stress the role trust plays in enhancing leadership proc-esses, irrespective of whether one person is cen-trally responsible for the governance of that process, or whether governance is distributed among a group of interdependent actors, as in the case of the famous Orpheus Orchestra that Hackman has described. I think it is safe to conclude, on the basis of the empirical findings reviewed in this chapter, that adequate evidence exists as to the central impor-tance trust plays in effective leadership processes. Considerable progress has been made, in particular, with respect to clarifying the nature of this rela-tionship, its benefits, as well as some of the diffi-culties that attend it. As also evident from this review, considerable progress is evident with respect to identifying the cognitive, social, and behavioral antecedents or underpinnings of trust in this process. Despite these impressive strides, some impor-tant lacunae persist in our understanding of the role trust plays in leadership processes.

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