Second, policies and practices should be regularly examined for their implicit and explicit messages about trusting relationships. Performance evaluations systems, accounting and reporting practices, decision-making levels, supervision, monitoring of all types of employee behaviors (e.g., use of time, telephone and computer use) all have embedded messages about types and levels of trust within the organization.
Third, leaders should have training to enable a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes trust behaviors and to better understand distinctions between interpersonal and organizational trust. Many leaders pride themselves on their personal integrity without understanding that the position they occupy provides few within the organization the opportunity to interact on an interpersonal basis. Although their intensions may be trustworthy, the impact of leadership is interpreted through multiple networks of relationships and events.
Leadership training can include distinctions between interpersonal and organizational trust, ways of understanding trust within particular organizational contexts, and the opportunity to examine the leadership activities within the organization for their contributions to the trust environment. Employees also can benefit from awareness of the importance of organizational trust. Increased job satisfaction, the ability to innovate, and the ability to identify with a successful organizational all are related to perceptions of trust. Employee training can focus on how employees contribute to trust networks. Employees also are a primary source of ongoing organizational information about the trust climate.
Finally, the five dimensions of trust themselves should have an explicit organizational focus. How is competence expressed? How is concern exhibited? What constitutes reliability, especially during rapid change? How effectively have vision, values, and norms been communicated, and what type of alignment exists between leadership and employees? How do these dimensions extend to customers and other external stakeholders?
How can the organization focus strategically and tactically on trust? The answers to these questions and others become a significant responsibility for management, human resources, and organization development professionals as well as others throughout the organization.
Future research is needed to refine dimensions of trust with more complex conceptions of culture and with more diverse populations of organizational members. Many more national cultures and sizes and types of organizations should be represented in the data to understand the extent to which comparisons across national cultures within these dimensions is stable for less Western-oriented cultures. More broadly defined concepts of cultures and subcultures are needed to fully understand trust dimensions across cultures. Finally, research is needed to better define shifts and changes in trust over time within particular organizational contexts.