Abstract
PurposeThis study examines trust-repair practices at the team level after organizational change.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative research approach was adopted, and data were collected from key informants through focus group discussions and interviews. The data analysis involved thematic coding and followed the structured procedure.FindingsThis study found that after organization change, trust can be repaired at the team level by improving team leaders' information sharing and knowledge in change management, and by enforcing communication, collaboration and ethical behaviour among team members.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper makes three key contributions by (1) identifying trust violations in teams, (2) proposing trust-repair mechanisms and (3) extending the understanding of trust-repair and preservation at the team level following organizational change.Practical implicationsThis paper provides practical information from a real-work context and can improve managers' understanding of active trust-repair.Originality/valueThis paper outlines active trust-repair mechanisms in an organizational change context and expands the current theory by presenting novel insights into organizational trust-repair at the team level. This study contributes to trust literature by proposing promising avenues for future trust-repair research.
Highlights
Organizational changes, such as downsizings or other structural changes, have increased significantly
This study focuses on trust-repair after organizational change at the team level, taking into account the individuals within a team, but it does not address trust-repair at the organizational level
Incompetence of the team leaders and an absence of ethical behaviour and collaboration were the major problems cited in all respondent groups
Summary
Organizational changes, such as downsizings or other structural changes, have increased significantly. Change challenges trust among team members, can hinder efficient operations and impact team performance (Costa et al, 2017). The high importance of trust raises the question of how team leaders and other team members can repair trust in teams when organizations are facing many rapid changes (Morgeson et al, 2015). There is less research at the team level (Kim et al, 2006; Lewicki et al, 2016). Most of the scant research that does exist at that level has dealt with competence-based trust violations (Sverdrup and Stensaker, 2018). Organizational trust-repair research at the team level has dominated mainly on laboratory experiments to measure the differences among a few trust-repair practices, for example, the effect of apology vs denial
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