C’mon, you can trust me!
Topic: Organizational Justice, Job Performance, Trust
Publication: Journal of Management
Article: The
Relationship between being perceived as trustworthy and performance
Blogger: Larry Martinez
OK,
so most of the research done on trustworthiness in the workplace has focused on
whether or not you think that your coworkers and leaders are trustworthy and
the related implications (if you don’t trust your boss you’ll be less likely to
perform well for him or her). But
what about the other side of the coin?
Dirks and Skarlicki wanted to know how being perceived as trustworthy effects
job performance – the idea being that if your coworkers think you are
trustworthy, they’ll be more likely to offer you resources. Well, that’s exactly what they found,
but they broke it down into a bit more detail. Consider the following two facets of trustworthiness:
Capability: Do you have the ability to provide resources?
Integrity: Will you be fair and honest (specifically, will you return the favor if someone helps you out)?
The authors found that the interaction of those two variables predicted job performance. That is, if your coworkers perceive you to be capable and fair, they’ll see you as being trustworthy and thus offer resources to you. Those resources, which you most likely couldn’t have gotten on your own, help you do your own job better. This relationship only held for employees who were considered to have both high integrity and high capability; the performance of employees with lower integrity scores did not change, regardless of how high their ‘capable’ ratings were.
So,
in an organization, leaders can focus on the potential performance benefits for
being trustworthy (capable and
fair/honest). Training programs
would have to focus on both capability and integrity, since one or the other
doesn’t have as strong of a stand-alone effect.
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