Trust-Building Talk: Is it Quality or Quantity?
Communication and trust go hand in hand. Good communication builds trust within organizations and boosts employee involvement. But what qualifies as “good” trust-building communications? Well, it depends on who is on the receiving end.
Thomas (Naval Postgraduate School), Zolin (Queensland U of Technology), and Hartman (Colorado State U) set out to investigate the linkages among quality of information, quantity of information, trust, and outcomes such as employee involvement. For data, they used communication audits from 218 employees in the Texas and Oklahoma oil industry. Audits are used to identify communications patterns within an organization.
Thomas et al found that for building trust among co-workers and supervisors, quality of information — its accuracy, timeliness, and usefulness — is most important for building trust than quantity of information. But for building trust in senior management, it is the quantity of information that is most important.
Information coming from top management is seldom specific to an individual’s job and is generally focused on the big picture, write Thomas, Zolin, and Hartman in the Journal of Business Communication. “Top management depends on supervisors to translate this abstract information into more task-related, relevant communication. While employees count on top management to set the strategy and determine criteria for organizational success, then, supervisors must be trusted to show workers the connection between employees’ jobs and the organization’s goals and to provide the more specific, high-quality information needed to perform their jobs well. Coworkers, likewise, are depended on for high-quality information needed for job execution.”
The researchers also found that, in all cases, trust was very closely tied to perceptions of organizational openness which, in turn, is linked to high employee involvement.
“The central role of communication in developing trust and its effect on employee involvement”, by Gail Fann Thomas, Roxanne Zolin, and Jackie L. Hartman; Journal of Business Communication (Vol. 46, No. 3, July 2009; pp. 287-310)
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