Fischer Sarah, Clarke Julian, Walker Arlene, Hyder Shannon
School of Psychology, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
Aust J Psychol. 2023 Oct 4;75(1):2260498. doi: 10.1080/00049530.2023.2260498. eCollection 2023.
The literature shows employee trust in leaders supports organisational performance, despite much still being unknown about the employee-leader trust relationship. This study aimed to explore employee trust in leaders through trust breaches to broaden knowledge about the multidimensional nature of the trust construct and provide organisations with a focus on how to improve employee trust in leaders.
Trust breaches were explored using hypothetical vignettes. Participants received one scenario with a combination of a relationship treatment and behavioural treatment. There were three relationship treatments: no relationship, new relationship, and established relationship between employee and leader. There were also eight unique behavioural treatments of trust breach between employee and leader in the workplace (for example, betraying agreements).
Using one-way and two-way analysis of variance, findings showed that only those allocated to the established relationship group were likely to trust the hypothetical leader in the future. While all behavioural breaches negatively influenced future trust, the behaviours of leader lying to, betraying confidentiality of, and publicly belittling the employee were significantly less likely to engender future employee trust.
This study offers a novel perspective to exploring employee-leader multidimensional organisational trust by investigating trust breaches according to type of relationship and behavioural breach type. This study showed behavioural breaches negatively influence perceptions of future employee trust in leaders. It also reaffirms that established relationships are most likely to be resilient to trust breaches over nominal or absent relationships between employees and their leader.
文献表明员工对领导者的信任有助于组织绩效，尽管员工与领导者之间的信任关系仍有许多未知之处。本研究旨在通过信任违背来探索员工对领导者的信任，以拓宽对信任结构多维性质的认识，并为组织提供如何提高员工对领导者信任的关注点。
使用假设情景来探讨信任违背。参与者会收到一个包含关系处理和行为处理组合的情景。有三种关系处理方式：无关系、新关系以及员工与领导者之间的既定关系。在工作场所中员工与领导者之间还存在八种独特的信任违背行为处理方式（例如，违背协议）。
通过单向和双向方差分析，结果表明只有那些被分配到既定关系组的人未来才可能信任假设的领导者。虽然所有行为违背都会对未来信任产生负面影响，但领导者说谎、泄露员工机密以及公开贬低员工的行为导致员工未来产生信任的可能性显著降低。
本研究通过根据关系类型和行为违背类型调查信任违背，为探索员工与领导者之间的多维组织信任提供了一个新视角。本研究表明行为违背会对员工未来对领导者信任的认知产生负面影响。它还重申，与员工和领导者之间名义上或不存在的关系相比，既定关系最有可能抵御信任违背。
