By Liz Hall
We need to remove the taboo about talking about trust – the helping professions have a role to play in ensuring this happens.
This was one of the messages from Donald L Ferrin, associate professor at Singapore Management University, in his keynote address to the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference in Brighton on 13-16 January 2010.
Ferrin rounded up some of the key research to date on trust, reporting that trust in organisations had declined in most countries, for example.
Trust problems are not automatically an indictment of character. They more often reflect imperfect management and room for improvement, he said. He said that trust is not dichotomous; it is a scale variable. In almost all organizations, more trust would be useful. He said leaders need to be much more inquisitive about how they are perceived.
He said the way forward was to remove the taboo from talking about trust- talking about it and how to increase it needs to become part of the dialogue in healthy organizations. Those in the helping professions including internal and external occupational psychologists can help foster the inquisitiveness and dialogue.