A few remarks on trust and humans

Citation

Magala, S. (2013), "A few remarks on trust and humans", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 26 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2013.02326daa.002

A few remarks on trust and humans

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 26, Issue 4

The two other papers, which complete the present issue of JOCM are linked to a very sensitive area in recent organizational, managerial and even behavioral and cognitive studies, namely to the issues of trust viewed from the point of an employed individual (“Trust in change managers: the role of affect”, by Roy Smollan) and from the point of a specific institutionalized and functional part of managerial team in professional organizations – namely the Human Resources Department (“Managers as change agents: implications for HR managers engaging with culture change” by Llandis Barratt-Pugh, Susanne Bahn and Elsie Gahere).

If I could borrow the title of the latest collection of essays by a cyber-punk novelist, William Gibson (who had immortalized himself with Mona Lisa Overdrive, Necromancer and Pattern Recognition), I would have gladly done so to describe recent surge in effective, emotional, sensitivity and sensibility studies in social sciences. Roy Smollan investigates employees who come to trust or distrust their managers as events fly by and records the emotions arising with the trustworthiness ratings going up or down. Employees, not surprisingly, come to feel positive emotions if they trust their managers’ abilities, benevolence and integrity, or negative emotions, if they come to distrust immediate supervisors or more senior managers. Again, not very surprisingly, negative emotions are stronger and more intense than positive ones (perhaps the evolutionary trace of an early warning function). He tries to establish a red thread through his study, demonstrating that transparency, fair practices and ethical organizational culture all might work for stimulating and sustaining commitment to organizational change. Is he right? Well, emotions expressed in positive views of supervisors (“our managers cared about people deeply … ”, “they were really gutted when this happened”) and negative ones (“they were vain, arrogant and petty people”) appear articulate enough, so do those of anger (felt against those managers who, according to employees, lied to them). It is fascinating to see how we construct the Greek dramas in daily settings, how we offer biblical condemnation and speak of “betrayal” (if managers are perceived to lack either integrity or benevolence or both). Shouldn’t someone study the symbolic resources of individuals and organizations – those cultural capitals which enable us to dramatize, articulate and express our powerful sentiments in the theatre of organizational dramas?

Llandis Barratt-Pugh et al.’s study of the role of HR managers in a large merger of two sizeable public bureaucracies is more restrained emotion-wise. The authors are interested in the organizational, mezzo level of social and organizational change and in cultural resources employed by the HR sections of public bureaucracies in order to “orchestrate” a culture change. They ask what actions undertaken by the HR departments of both merging organizations did accelerate change process and which did not. Their institutional analysis is based on a dynamic model of culture and organization – a merger, according to them, entails a destruction and a reconstruction of an organizational culture and the price paid for it is in both phases an emotional confusion. Nevertheless, the HR department should not be just a first aid station, with HR managers caressing the wounded egos, managing out-placements and catering to traumatized employees. They urge HR managers to be more proactive, especially if thousands of individuals are at stake. Clearly, the authors feel the same emotional uneasiness, as Smollan did, because they do quote Beer’s relevant comparison of two theoretical perspectives on organizational change, namely the agency theory (top management designs incentives, employees then create economic and non-economic value for shareholders and stakeholders) and the behavioral process theories (in Beer’s case reducible, unfortunately, to a commitment to change. Their conclusions read very well:

Managers had a direct influence on all the agencies of change’, and could largely determine which additional duties and/or projects to delegate, which secondments, transfers, promotions or position changes to initiate, and which acting positions to advertise for their area. This was despite the highly formalized job descriptions existing within a Public Service organization.

Hence the overall conclusion that HR departments should not be content with regulatory enforcement, job description fit measurements and exit seminars, but should go for collaborative reflection, which could help identify, reinforce and use the informal agencies of change. It is interesting to read this in a relatively isolated case of an Australian public sector change, because one cannot help thinking that these conclusions, mundane, matter of fact, restrained, are in fact pointing in the same direction as 99 percent and OWS protests – towards the new era of citizens reclaiming their public spaces and voices and returning from an exile of the neolib era, which froze the public sphere into TV politics made by political PR wizards to a more normal, humane, emotionally friendly world. But not quite, not yet.

Slawek Magala