Trust Matters: For Organisational and Personal Success

Citation

(2004), "Trust Matters: For Organisational and Personal Success", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 53 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2004.07953gae.005

Trust Matters: For Organisational and Personal Success

Trust Matters: For Organisational and Personal Success

Sally Bibb and Jeremy KourdiPalgrave MacmillanISBN: 1403932530£25.50

This book is about alternative approaches to relationships of trust and business cultures. This is increasingly important since a number of recent scandals in the political and business worlds, along with the growth of what has become known as “spin” have lessened trust in leaders. No longer do we expect them to be individuals with strong personal or even professional values.

Put simply, this book is concerned with what can be achieved when trust is present and what can happen when it’s not. It suggests – perhaps not surprisingly, that in a world where trust has diminished, those organisations and individual that command it have a distinct advantage.

The book also provides compelling evidence of how trust can be easily destroyed, where change programmes go wrong because of the absence of trust and almost a whole chapter is devoted to lying, or “one of the great destroyers of trust”.

However, not all the arguments are straightforward. The book suggests that trust is absolute – either it exists or it doesn’t; no grey area in-between, It also suggests that trust can be created – almost as a “policy” or strategy, but this seems to diminish the central argument.

With a few caveats, therefore, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book; it is not a manual on the creation of trust.