Trust Relations in High-Reliability Organizations

Workplace trust has been recognized by researchers and practitioners alike to be an important component of an effective safety culture. However, despite this, the concept of trust as it relates to safety has been underresearched, particularly within high-reliability organizations. This article examines the importance of trust relations and their concomitant impact on safety culture within the specific context of high-reliability organizations using relevant literatures. The article then explores the implications of high and low trust situations for safety through case studies conducted within the nuclear and offshore industries as exemplars of organizations operating within high-reliability sectors.     

Trust: Missing Piece(s) in the Safety Puzzle

While trust is increasingly recognized as a factor that impacts on safety behavior, the exact nature of trust and its role in shaping organizational safety is poorly understood. This special issue contains six articles that examine the relationship between trust and safety behavior in a range of high-risk work contexts. The issue begins with two articles that introduce the complex nature of trust and the positive and negative roles that trust can play in shaping an organization's safety culture. This background is then developed by two articles that explore the role of trust and distrust in safety performance, and uncover a range of significant but often counterintuitive relationships between forms of trust and safe behavior. Finally, the issue concludes with two articles that examine the role that leadership may play in developing trust. These articles examine the conditions important for the development of trust in leaders, and the trust-promoting actions that leaders can employ to influence employees' engagement in safety participation.     

The Role of Distrust in Offshore Safety Performance

Trust is recognized as a potentially important factor in safety within high-risk industries. However, little detailed empirical research has explored how trust operates in these contexts to influence worker safety performance. The present study addresses this by (i) identifying the target (occupational group) in which trust is most important for good safety, and (ii) establishing the "type" of trust (trust or distrust) with the greatest impact on safety performance. A questionnaire survey of 203 UK offshore gas workers' attitudes of trust and distrust toward four occupational groups (workmates, supervisors, offshore managers, and contractors) and an operating company was conducted. Logistic regression analysis identified attitudes toward offshore management as the strongest predictor of safety performance at an industry level. At an installation level, safety performance was best predicted by attitudes toward contractors and workmates. Further analysis revealed attitudes of distrust as better predictors of safety performance compared to attitudes of trust. These findings suggest that safety professionals should pay more attention to the role of distrust in safety performance. They also suggest that safety initiatives should target attitudes toward specific groups for optimal effectiveness.     

Changing Corporate Governance in Response to Negative Media Reports

We study how organizations change their corporate governance in response to negative publicity in the media. We build on insights from the literature on interpersonal trust to theorize how organizations respond to different types of trust‐damaging information. We suggest that organizations are likely to replace key individuals involved in the corporate governance process when trust‐damaging information provides evidence of low integrity. In contrast, organizations are likely to make changes in how the governance process is organized when trust‐damaging information provides evidence of low benevolence. We test our hypotheses by using data on publicly traded Korean firms from 2006 to 2013. Our results provide general support for our argument about corporate governance changes that organizations initiate in response to different types of trust‐damaging information. We also explore how foreign ownership and state ownership moderate organizational responses to trust‐damaging information.     

Determinants of Trust in Industry, Government, and Citizen''s Groups in Japan

The causal structure of the determinants of trust in industry, government, and citizen's groups in Japan was investigated on the basis of Peters et al. (1997). A preliminary survey of the adequacy of the hypotheses proposed by Peters et al. in Japan was made. A set of hypothesized determinants of trust in Japan was proposed based on results of the preliminary survey. Questionnaires concerning perceptions of trust in the organizations and the proposed determinants were sent by mail to residents in the area where environmental risk problems had emerged. The data were analyzed by covariance structure analysis to construct models of trust in industry, government, and citizen's groups. As a result, "openness and honesty," "concern and care," "competence," "people's concern with risks," and "consensual values" were found to be factors directly determining trust. Suggested in particular is that "openness" of an organization is not attained merely by information disclosure, but also by bi-directional communication with the people. Moreover, these models include "consensual values," which do not appear in the model proposed by Peters et al.     

Building Trusting Multicultural Organizations: Rethinking the Influence of Culture on Interpersonal Trust Development in the Workplace

Building trusting, multicultural organizations require us to accentuate ‘sharedness’ rather than identifying differences. This study investigates how organizational members activate multiple sources of cultural values to develop trust with their colleagues from different cultural backgrounds. Through a series of surveys followed by semi-structured interviews, data were collected from members operating in five different multinational organizations based in Germany and South Africa. Analyzed abductively, our findings illustrate the multiple sources of cultural values that influence members' disposition to trust and their assessment of their colleague's trustworthiness. We further show how four levels of trust emerge as an outcome of the interplay between these various cultural dimensions. Through our multidimensional operationalization of culture, we show how variations, not only across, but within individuals can hinder or promote trusting relationships in the workplace. This study highlights the need for more nuanced approaches towards the examination of the influence of culture on trust.     

Explicit and Implicit Trust Within Safety Culture

Safety culture is an important topic for managers in high-hazard industries because a deficient safety culture has been linked to organizational accidents. Many researchers have argued that trust plays a central role in models of safety culture but trust has rarely been measured in safety culture/climate studies. This article used explicit (direct) and implicit (indirect) measures to assess trust at a UK gas plant. Explicit measures assessed trust by asking workers to consider and state their attitude to attitude objects. Implicit measures assessed trust in a more subtle way by using a priming task that relies on automatic attitude activation. The results show that workers expressed explicit trust for their workmates, supervisors, and senior managers, but only expressed implicit trust for their workmates. The article proposes a model that conceptualizes explicit trust as part of the surface levels of safety culture and implicit trust as part of the deeper levels of safety culture. An unintended finding was the positive relationship between implicit measures of trust and distrust, which suggests that trust and distrust are separate constructs. The article concludes by considering the implications for safety culture and trust and distrust in high-hazard industries.     

Trust, confidence, procedural fairness, outcome fairness, moral conviction, and the acceptance of GM field experiments

In 2005, Swiss citizens endorsed a moratorium on gene technology, resulting in the prohibition of the commercial cultivation of genetically modified crops and the growth of genetically modified animals until 2013. However, scientific research was not affected by this moratorium, and in 2008, GMO field experiments were conducted that allowed us to examine the factors that influence their acceptance by the public. In this study, trust and confidence items were analyzed using principal component analysis. The analysis revealed the following three factors: "economy/health and environment" (value similarity based trust), "trust and honesty of industry and scientists" (value similarity based trust), and "competence" (confidence). The results of a regression analysis showed that all the three factors significantly influenced the acceptance of GM field experiments. Furthermore, risk communication scholars have suggested that fairness also plays an important role in the acceptance of environmental hazards. We, therefore, included measures for outcome fairness and procedural fairness in our model. However, the impact of fairness may be moderated by moral conviction. That is, fairness may be significant for people for whom GMO is not an important issue, but not for people for whom GMO is an important issue. The regression analysis showed that, in addition to the trust and confidence factors, moral conviction, outcome fairness, and procedural fairness were significant predictors. The results suggest that the influence of procedural fairness is even stronger for persons having high moral convictions compared with persons having low moral convictions.     

Who Does the Public Trust? The Case of Genetically Modified Food in the United States

Trust is important for the perception of many types of risk, including those relating to genetically modified (GM) food. Who the public trusts in any given circumstance, however, is not well understood. In this study of public trust regarding GM food, an exploratory factor analysis with Promax rotation reveals public classification of three common institutional types-evaluators, watchdogs, and merchants. The structure of relationships among these stakeholders can act to enable or constrain public support for this new technology. Evaluators-scientists, universities, and medical professionals-are the most trusted. Watchdogs-consumer advocacy organizations, environmental organizations, and media sources-are moderately trusted. Merchants-grocers and grocery stores, industry, and farmers-are least trusted. While the federal government is seen as closest to being an evaluator, it is not highly correlated with any of the factors. The lack of trust in the organizations with the greatest resources and responsibilities for ensuring the safety of GM food should be seen as an important obstacle to the adoption of the technology.     

Chemical Manufacturing and Refining Industry Legitimacy: Reflective Management,Trust, Precrisis Communication to Achieve Community Efficacy

Calls for emergency right‐to‐know in the 1980s, and, in the 1990s, risk management planning, motivated U.S. chemical manufacturing and refining industries to operationalize a three‐pronged approach to risk minimization and communication: reflective management to increase legitimacy, operational safety programs to raise trust, and community engagement designed to facilitate citizens’ emergency response efficacy. To assess these management, operational, and communication initiatives, communities (often through Local Emergency Planning Committees) monitored the impact of such programs. In 2012, the fourth phase of a quasi‐longitudinal study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of operational change and community outreach in one bellwether community. This study focuses on legitimacy, trust, and response efficacy to suggest that an industry can earn legitimacy credits by raising its safety and environmental impact standards, by building trust via that change, and by communicating emergency response messages to near residents to raise their response efficacy. As part of its campaign to demonstrate its concern for community safety through research, planning, and implementation of safe operations and viable emergency response systems, this industry uses a simple narrative of risk/emergency response—shelter‐in‐place—communicated by a spokes‐character: Wally Wise Guy.     

Navigating the Life Cycle of Trust in Developing Economies: One‐size Solutions Do Not Fit All

Trust is critical to the development and maintenance of collaborative and cohesive relationships in societies, broadly, and in organizations, specifically. At the same time, trust is highly dependent on the social context in which it occurs. Unfortunately, existing research involving trust remains somewhat limited to a particular set of developed economies, providing a window to explore a culture's stage of economic development as a key contextual determinant of trust within organizations. In this article, we review the state of the scholarship on trust and identify those qualities of trust that are common in organizations at similar stages of economic development, referred to as its etic aspects. We then also distinguish those elements of trust that are, to the contrary, culturally specific or emic in nature. We structure our discussion around the “life cycle of trust” (i.e., the creation, maintenance, and postfracture repair of trust) and consider unique factors in its application to developing economies. In doing so, we ground our examination in expository examples through field experience in Haiti. We conclude with the proposal of a framework for future research oriented toward the resolution of remaining theoretical and empirical queries as they relate to trust in developing economies.     

Safety culture on the UK railway network

Safety culture is an important concept in understanding the involvement of organizations in accidents and as a tool in safety management. British Rail, the public sector company which ran the UK railway network until its privatization in April 1994, was criticized for its 'poor safety culture' following a major accident at Clapham Junction, London, in 1988, in which 35 lives were lost. Studies conducted after the accident have demonstrated that deficiencies in the organization's safety culture may be related to workers' negative perceptions of managers' commitment to safety. These perceptions underlie a lack of mutual trust between staff and managers, which has implications for the fostering of open and honest communications within the network, and for the development of a positive safety culture. Communication problems are likely to be compounded by the privatization of British Rail, which has involved the fragmentation of the network, with different bodies responsible for infrastructure maintenance and train operation. The repercussions of privatizing the railway network are discussed in the context of safety culture research.     

Safety sans Frontières: An International Safety Culture Model

The management of safety culture in international and culturally diverse organizations is a concern for many high‐risk industries. Yet, research has primarily developed models of safety culture within Western countries, and there is a need to extend investigations of safety culture to global environments. We examined (i) whether safety culture can be reliably measured within a single industry operating across different cultural environments, and (ii) if there is an association between safety culture and national culture. The psychometric properties of a safety culture model developed for the air traffic management (ATM) industry were examined in 17 European countries from four culturally distinct regions of Europe (North, East, South, West). Participants were ATM operational staff (n = 5,176) and management staff (n = 1,230). Through employing multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, good psychometric properties of the model were established. This demonstrates, for the first time, that when safety culture models are tailored to a specific industry, they can operate consistently across national boundaries and occupational groups. Additionally, safety culture scores at both regional and national levels were associated with country‐level data on Hofstede's five national culture dimensions (collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long‐term orientation). MANOVAs indicated safety culture to be most positive in Northern Europe, less so in Western and Eastern Europe, and least positive in Southern Europe. This indicates that national cultural traits may influence the development of organizational safety culture, with significant implications for safety culture theory and practice.     

信任、忠诚与家族主义困境

马克斯·韦伯在《儒教与道教》中指出：“……经济伦理往往是十分复杂的东西 ,受到多方面的限制;另外 ,我们也会看到 ,表面上相似的经济组织形式与一种极不相同的经济伦理结合起来 ,就会按照各自的特点产生出极不相同的历史作用。经济伦理不是经济组织形式的简单的‘因变量’ ,同样 ,经济伦理也不是反过来从自己一方去塑造经济组织形式。” (中译本 ,１９９９)。我们在这里研究的信任属于经济伦理的范畴 ,长期以来被排斥在规范经济学的研究范围之外。近年来 ,对于东亚经济奇迹的研究表明 ,缺乏经济伦理与文化维度的研究 ,就不能很好地理解…     

The Sound of Silence. Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Discrimination in ‘Inclusive Organizations’

Most studies on diversity and discrimination in the workplace have focused on ‘visible’ minorities such as gender or race, often neglecting the experiences of invisible minorities such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers. In this paper we explore the practices of inclusion/exclusion of LGBTs in the workplace in Italian social cooperatives, which are specifically founded to create employment for people who are disadvantaged in the labour market. The study examines how organizations, which have an ethos focused on inclusion and mainly employ workers from specific social minority groups, manage the inclusion of LGBT workers. We also explore the experience of LGBT workers within these organizations. The paper reports that the culture of silence existing in the five organizations studied prevents LGBT employees from constructing a work identity which encompasses their sexual identity and prevents the organizations from achieving their aim of being fully inclusive workplaces.     

Safety culture: Key theoretical issues

The organizational preconditions to major systems failures are seen as increasingly important for risk management. However, existing empirical attempts to study safety culture and its relationship to organizational outcomes have remained fragmented and underspecified in theoretical terms. This is despite the existence of a number of well-developed theories of organizationally induced accidents and disasters. Reasons for this disfunction of theory and practice are first considered. The paper then outlines four key theoretical questions for safety culture researchers: the fact that culture acts simultaneously as a precondition both for safe operations and for the oversight of incubating hazards (the paradox of 'safety' culture); the challenge of dealing with complex and ill-structured hazardous situations where decision makers are faced with deep forms of uncertainty represented by incompleteness of knowledge or ignorance; the need to consider the construction of risk perceptions in workgroups, and to view risk acceptability as the outcome of a process of social negotiation; and the fact that institutional politics and power are critical for determining the achievement of safety culture goals, and in particular that of organizational learning.     

An Empirical Investigation of Web Site Use Using a Commitment‐Based Model

Companies throughout industry are interested in retaining existing customers, because customers' continuous consumption of products and services is critical to the long‐term value propositions of most organizations. Thus, decision‐making strategies that promote continuous use and customer retention are of research interest, both theoretically and practically. In the present research, we investigate one important area of continuous usage, that of Web site use. In particular, we use several theories of commitment to understand how an individual's decision to continue to use a Web site is influenced by his or her commitment toward that Web site and the vendor that supports it. Results derived from data collected from 335 users of a variety of Web sites indicated that affective commitment, calculative commitment, quality of alternatives, and trust were significantly associated with an individual's behavioral intention to continue to use a Web site. Implications for customer retention and decision‐making strategies are discussed.     

Safety culture: Key theoretical issues

Abstract

The organizational preconditions to major systems failures are seen as increasingly important for risk management. However, existing empirical attempts to study safety culture and its relationship to organizational outcomes have remained fragmented and underspecified in theoretical terms. This is despite the existence of a number of well-developed theories of organizationally induced accidents and disasters. Reasons for this disfunction of theory and practice are first considered. The paper then outlines four key theoretical questions for safety culture researchers: the fact that culture acts simultaneously as a precondition both for safe operations and for the oversight of incubating hazards (the paradox of ‘safety’ culture); the challenge of dealing with complex and ill-structured hazardous situations where decision makers are faced with deep forms of uncertainty represented by incompleteness of knowledge or ignorance; the need to consider the construction of risk perceptions in workgroups, and to view risk acceptability as the outcome of a process of social negotiation; and the fact that institutional politics and power are critical for determining the achievement of safety culture goals, and in particular that of organizational learning.     

The Bright Side of Being Prosocial at Work,and the Dark Side,Too: A Review and Agenda for Research on Other-Oriented Motives,Behavior, and Impact in Organizations

More than a quarter century ago, organizational scholars began to explore the implications of prosociality in organizations. Three interrelated streams have emerged from this work, which focus on prosocial motives (the desire to benefit others or expend effort out of concern for others), prosocial behaviors (acts that promote/protect the welfare of individuals, groups, or organizations), and prosocial impact (the experience of making a positive difference in the lives of others through one's work). Prior studies have highlighted the importance of prosocial motives, behaviors, and impact, and have enhanced our understanding of each of them. However, there has been little effort to systematically review and integrate these related lines of work in a way that furthers our understanding of prosociality in organizations. In this article, we provide an overview of the current state of the literature, highlight key findings, identify major research themes, and address important controversies and debates. We call for an expanded view of prosocial behavior and a sharper focus on the costs and unintended consequences of prosocial phenomena. We conclude by suggesting a number of avenues for future research that will address unanswered questions and should provide a more complete understanding of prosociality in the workplace.     

Servant leadership,employer brand perception,trust in leaders and turnover intentions: a sequential mediation model

The study aimed to examine the impact of the servant leadership style on employee turnover intentions by investigating the sequential mediating effects of employer brand perception and level of trust subordinates have in their leaders. Results of the study were obtained by analysing data collected from 253 employees working in Indian organizations. The results fully support the hypotheses proposed in the study, illustrating that perceived servant leadership style is negatively associated with employee turnover intentions. Further, servant leadership-turnover intentions relationship is sequentially mediated by employer brand perception and the level of trust subordinates have in their leaders. The study also found that only the servant leadership style followed by leaders was not enough to directly influence the level of trust employees placed in their leaders. A positive and strong employer brand perception emerged as an important mechanism that helped servant leaders gain the trust of their followers. The theoretical and managerial implications are further discussed in the light of these findings.