Cecily Cooper is a contributor of The Trust Project at Northwestern University.

Associate Professor of Management
University of Miami School of Business Administration / Organizational Behavior

Cecily Cooper is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Miami. She earned her BA from the University of Florida and her PhD in Organizational Behavior from the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. Her research focuses on cultivating trust in management through model behavior, and the ways in which that behavior can impact an organization. She also studies broken trust within organizations, exploring the various kinds of trust violations and the most effective path toward repairing broken trust.

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Videos by Cecily Cooper

How to Repair Broken Trust: An Organizational Behavior Perspective

Contributor / Cecily Cooper
Cecily Cooper Organizational Behavior Breaches,Definitions,Communication,Authenticity Organizational behavior scholars study trust repair because it’s really important to understand how to maintain trust in organizations.

Trust is a driver of many key outcomes, such as employee job performance, helping behaviors, and job attitudes.

Trust also enables the coordination and the cooperation that’s necessary to achieve both day-to-day tasks and long-term challenging goals.

The problem, however, is that trust is also very fragile and easily broken, and thus the need for its repair.

When talking about interpersonal trust repair, we’re focusing on two parties: One is the trustee, and the trustee is the transgressor. And the other is the trustor. The trustor is the focus of the repair efforts.

But what we find is that there’s no one best approach for repairing trust; it depends on the type of violation.

Bumper: How the Impact of an Apology Depends on the Dimension of Trust

And research has found a really useful distinction in comparing competence- versus integrity-related violations of trust.

So, competence and integrity are two of the three dimensions of trustworthiness.

And when we look at attribution theory, the schematic model of dispositional attribution explains to us that people interpret information about integrity and competence very differently.

And what happens is that people anchor on negative signals of integrity more so than positive and positive signals of competence more so than negative.

So, if you embezzle funds from a bank but then act in a trustworthy manner later on, people still are not likely to trust you, because they see that one indication of you stealing as being very diagnostic of who you really are.

But when it comes to competence—and I’ll use a baseball analogy here—if you hit a home run, people see you as being a home-run hitter even if you strike out afterwards.

So, people see competence-related issues as being much more changeable, whereas integrity-related issues are much more stable and enduring.

Because of this, research finds that apologies can be very effective for overcoming competence-related violations because they communicate redemption.

But apologies are not effective for overcoming integrity-related violations because they also acknowledge guilt.

And that acknowledgment of guilt is very damaging because, again, people see these integrity-related issues as being relatively stable and enduring.

Bumper: Two Categories for Trust Repair Tactics

So, what tactics can be used to repair trust? Well, for simplicity’s sake, we can think of them as falling into two categories: verbal responses and substantive responses.

And verbal responses include things such as excuses, promises, denial, different types of apologies.

And for substantive responses, research has examined acts of penance (that means taking on a personal cost), reparations (that’s paying damages to the person who was harmed), or monitoring systems (imposing a monitoring system on the person who violated trust so that they can’t transgress again).

But we can’t say that either verbal or substantive responses are more effective; it really depends on how they’re offered and under what circumstances.

The important thing is that when the response is offered, it has to signal that the person has really repented, that they are trying to change who they are. Perceived repentance is key.

The second issue is that if deception was involved, people are not likely to believe verbal responses, because they feel that if they were deceived one time, that the verbal responses are probably just mere talk.

Research also gives some indication that over time, actions might be weighted more heavily than words—so, actions might be more important than words.

An interesting caveat, though, is that research also finds that larger substantive acts are not necessarily more effective than smaller ones.

So, specifically, research that’s looked at reparations, for example—giving money to the person that was harmed—has found that a lot of times, smaller amounts of money are just as effective as larger amounts.

And again, this goes back to the importance of signaling that you’ve repented.

And so, if that small amount of money gives just as strong a signal that you’ve repented as the larger amount, then there’s actually no added benefit to giving extra amounts of money, which is pretty interesting.

But the final thing to remember is, though, that signaling repentance through either verbal or substantive responses will be much more effective after a competence-related violation rather than integrity-related violation. So, again, violation type is key.

Trust repair is still a relatively new area of study under the larger umbrella of trust research. And repair scholars are still trying to identify which responses are most effective for repairing trust and under what conditions.

Four Strategies to Increase Trust across Your Organization

Contributor / Cecily Cooper
Cecily Cooper Organizational Behavior Leadership,Vulnerability,Communication Well, trust and leadership has been shown time and time again to relate to many key outcomes, such as employee job performance, helping behaviors, and job attitudes.

So, as a senior leader, you want to do anything that you can to increase trust in leadership across levels of the organization.

Now, one of the first key things that you can do is make sure that you treat your employees fairly because fairness engenders trust.

So, if employees feel that they’re being paid fairly, that decisions are made in a consistent and unbiased fashion, and that they’re treated with dignity and respect, then chances are they’re going to trust you.

Now, on the other hand, if you hear employees complaining that things are just not fair, then chances are they don’t trust you. And so, that’s one key thing to remember.

Second, you have to make sure that your words and your actions are aligned—so, there has to be consistency between what you say and what you do.

Third, transparency is really important. And by transparency, I mean that you need to communicate as openly and frequently as possible with employees and also give them as much information as possible.

And the last thing that I would like to mention, and this is a little different because most research on trust has been looking at employees trusting their leaders and why that’s important for so many reasons, but now we also know that it’s really important that employees feel trusted, that employees feel that their leaders trust them.

And since trust is a reciprocal process, if the employees feel that the leaders trust them, they’re also more likely to trust their leaders.

So, then the next question is, but how can a manager signal that they trust their employees? There’s a lot of different things that they can do.

They can give their employees more responsibility, more autonomy; don’t micromanage, don’t monitor—overly monitory—your employees.

And if there are positions that need to be filled in the organization, promote from within; don’t hire externally.

Bumper: Understanding How a Trust Breach Is a Matter of Perspective

If you’re a leader and you’re accused of something, there are two questions that you should consider.

The first is, are you actually guilty?—because if you’re not guilty, then it benefits you to deny as quickly as possible, and also, if there is any exonerating evidence, to also offer that evidence to support your denial.

But what if you actually are guilty? Well, there’s a second important question.

And that is, was the transgression (that is, what you’re guilty of doing) a result of a lapse in competence versus integrity?—because research tells us that integrity-related issues are much more difficult to overcome than competence-related issues.

But at the same time, perception of the specific event can be malleable.

For example, if you just made an honest mistake or you did not have adequate knowledge and that’s why you didn’t prepare the tax return correctly, that’s a very different issue in other people’s minds than if you were trying to misrepresent the taxes.

Bumper: How “No Comment” Elicits Distrust

You don’t want to remain reticent on the issue; in other words, it’s really risky to not respond.

The problem is that even if people just hear an accusation, they’re likely to passively believe it unless they’re given a reason not to.

But the tricky thing for leaders is there could be a lot of reasons that they don’t want to respond. So, there could be legal reasons that they should not respond, or if they respond, they know that they might implicate a third party.

And so, for a lot of these reasons, you will see people delay responding or say, “No comment”—which is very frequently used.

Now, the intention might be to get people to delay judgment for a while. But what research shows is that instead of delaying judgment, people actually are more prone to make judgments and come to the worst possible conclusions.

By remaining silent on the issue, you’re not doing anything to mitigate this accusation of guilt by denying, and you’re not apologizing, so you’re not expressing any remorse.

And so, what happens is then people will think that you are in fact guilty, and you’re also not remorseful.