The Most Important Secret About TrustWhat Is Trust？You know when you have trust; you know

The Most Important Secret About Trust

What Is Trust？

You know when you have trust; you know when you don't have trust. Yet, what is trust and how is trust usefully defined for the workplace？ Can you build trust when it doesn't exist？ How do you maintain and build upon the trust you may currently have in your workplace？ These are important questions for today's rapidly changing world.

Trust forms the foundation for effective communication, employee retention, and employee motivation and contribution of discretionary (自由决定的) energy, the extra effort that people voluntarily invest in work. When trust exists in an organization or in a relationship, almost everything is easier to achieve.

According to Dr. Duane C. Tway, Jr. in his 1993 dissertation, A Construct of Trust, "There exists today, no practical construct of Trust that allows us to design and implement organizational interventions to significantly increase trust levels between people. We all think we know what Trust is from our own experience, but we don't know much about how to improve it. Why？ I believe it is because we have been taught to look at Trust as if it were a single entity."

The Three Constructs of Trust

Tway defines trust as "the state of readiness for unguarded interaction with someone or something". He developed a model of trust that includes three components. He calls trust a construct because it is "constructed" of these three components: the capacity for trusting, the perception of competence, and the perception of intentions. Thinking about trust as made up of the interaction and existence of these three components makes "trust" easier to understand. The capacity for trusting means that your life experiences have developed your current capacity and willingness to risk trusting others. The perception of competence is made up of your perception of your ability and the ability of others with whom you work in your current situation. The perception of intentions, as defined by Tway, is your perception that the actions, words, missions, or decisions are motivated by mutually-serving rather than self-serving motives.

Why Trust Is Critical in a Healthy Organization？

How important is building a trusting work environment？ According to Tway, people have been interested in trust since Aristotle. Tway states,"Aristotle (384BC-322BC), writing in the Rhetoric, suggested that Ethos, the Trust of a speaker by the listener, was based on the listener's perception of three characteristics of the speaker. Aristotle believed these three characteristics to be the intelligence of the speaker (correctness of opinions, or competen'ce), the character of the speaker (reliability--a competence factor, and honest--measure of intentions), and the goodwill of the speaker (favorable intentions toward the listener). I don't think this has changed much even today."

Additional research by Tway and others shows that trust is the basis for much of the environment you want to create in your workplace. Trust is the necessary precursor (先兆)for:

？feeling able to rely upon a person,

？cooperating with and experiencing teamwork with a group,

？taking thoughtful risks, and

？experiencing believable communication.

How to Maintain Trust？

The best way to maintain a trusting work environment is to keep from injuring trust in the first place. The integrity of the leadership of the organization is critical. The truthfulness and transparency of the communication with staff is also a critical factor. The presence of a strong, unifying mission and vision can also promote a trusting environment.

Providing information about the rationale, background, and thought processes behind decisions is also an important aspect of maintaining trust. Another is organizational success; peo

A．Y

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C．NG