The Organizational Trust
Model
the research we conducted for our book, Building the
High-Trust Organization: Strategies for Supporting Five
Key Dimensions of Trust, supported a model of organizational trust with five key drivers:
• Competence
• openness and honesty
• Concern for employees and stakeholders
• reliability
• identification
our research team learned that these five drivers were
strong and stable predictors of organizational trust
across cultures, languages, industries, and types of organizations. the more positive the trust scores of an
organization on our organizational trust inventory,
the more effective the organization was perceived to be
and the more satisfied with their jobs employees were.
Conversely, lower trust scores predicted lower effectiveness and less job satisfaction. in other words, positive
evaluations of each of the five drivers predict that an
organization will receive overall high trust scores, while
negative evaluations of the five dimensions result in
low trust. Let’s now take a closer look at the five drivers or dimensions of trust and consider some strategies
leaders can use to promote them in their organizations.