What Have We Learned About Trust from Recent Experiences with Teaming and Empowerment?

Abstract

Employee work teams exist within the larger framework of an organi sation's overall work system, and therefore, any discussion of trust and teams must reflect this context. In fact, trust is at the core of the assumptions about people which organisations make when designing their work systems. One need look no further than the Tayloristic work designs that have dominated the industrial landscape from the turn of the century until today to recognise the implied distrust embedded in such work designs. These workplaces, which focus on control and compliance (timeclocks, little or no sharing of information, low supervisor-to-employee ratios, task level management), operate on the assumption that people cannot be trusted, and this lack of trust breeds non-trustworthy behaviors in return. Those organisations that assume that people are not trustworthy and that implement policies and procedures which communicate this distrust should not be surprised if they reap what they sow. In unionised organisations, trust assumptions are also deeply em bedded in how labor and management interact to negotiate agreements and to solve problems. In many traditional organisations, lack of