Trust and Its Impacts on Organizational Change and Innovation in Social Services

Abstract

Mindful organizational change may be supported by the trust culture in the organization (interpersonal and organizational trust). Various dimensions of trust culture can be differentiated which may depend on the length of interpersonal cooperation or on the belonging to the organization. E.g., calculative trust may occur in short-term relationships while identification-based trust may occur in long-term cooperation. Trust is an important aspect in organizational change processes. It can support or avoid organizational change and innovation processes, e.g. identification-based trust might stabilize the status-quo situation and prevent organizational change processes (see Bleses P (2011) Ambivalenzen von Vertrauensbeziehungen in betrieblichen Veranderungsprozessen. Methodik der betrieblichen Analyse und Gestaltung. In: Becke G, Behrens M, Bleses P, Evers J, Hafkesbrink J (eds) Organisationale Achtsamkeit in betrieblichen Veranderungsprozessen – Zentrale Voraussetzung fur innovationsfahige Vertrauenskulturen. artec-paper Nr. 175, Bremen, pp 119–136). Especially in social services trust is an important source in every-day work, in internal and external cooperation and for the orientation on the client’s needs, because it is very much characterized by patterns of emotional work and empathic relations or interactions between service providers and clients. Furthermore, social services are facing enormous change processes, e.g. because of the external cost pressure and economization (Hartmann A (2011) Soziale Dienste: Merkmale, Aufgaben und Entwicklungstrends aus der Perspektive soziologischer Theorien. In: Evers A, Heinze RG, Olk T (eds) Handbuch soziale Dienste. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden, pp 76–93; Wulf-Schnabel J (2011) Reorganisation und Subjektivierungen von Sozialer Arbeit. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden). Costs for social services often need to be cut down due to general financing framework conditions in the health sector and supplying organizations have to deal with this challenge. How can trust be designed to support these organizational change processes in social services? First, knowledge on how trust culture is designed in the organization is necessary. Second, data on the most relevant trust mechanisms to support organizational change is required to choose the matching institutional mechanisms that are needed (e.g. communications systems). Within the project 8iNNO a concept was developed to collect data on the nowadays trust culture to get information on organizational mechanisms to support mindful organizational change. The thesis of this contribution is that different trust dimensions are of different relevance to support organizational change. Based on empirical findings within the project 8iNNO we will illustrate the relevance of a well-developed trust culture for organizational change.