Designing Trustworthy organizations

Abstract

Our model is based on research we conducted with colleagues over the last 12 years to understand how organizations and their leaders earn, maintain and violate trust and repair it after a violation. We conducted detailed reviews of the academic literatures on trust, trust building and trust repairi and basic experimental, field and theoretical research into the nature, development and repair of trust. In 2011, we completed a study commissioned by the Institute of Business Ethics of 30 organizations that had violated trust and then attempted to repair trust (with varying degrees of success) during the prior 10 yearsii; the study analyzed case study data based on both archival and interview sources. We have also conducted deep examinations of two large corporate and government organizations experiencing trust crises. For obvious reasons, the identity of the organizations must remain confidential. One was global and headquartered outside the United States; the other was U.S.-based and operated primarily within the United States. In both cases we had extensive access to key employees at all levels and collected interview and survey data. We supplemented the above research with an examination of best practices at select companies that consistently appear on the “Most Admired” and “Best Companies to Work For” lists compiled by Fortune magazine and data from several hundred executives and managers attending executive education leadership programs on the trust issues they experience in their organizations