Building Trust: Communication and Subordinate Trust in Public Organizations

BUILDING TRUST: COMMUNICATION AND SUBORDINATE TRUST IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS* Greg PORUMBESCU Jungho PARK Peter OOMSELS Greg PORUMBESCU (corresponding author) Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration, Myongji University, Seoul, South Korea Tel.: 0082-10-7202.1945 E-mail: Jungho PARK PhD Candidate, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US Peter OOMSELS PhD Candidate, Public Management Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium * Acknowledgements: The authors would like to extend their thanks to Professor Tobin Im and Soo Young Lee, from the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University. This work was supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2011-330-B00195 [I00035]). 158 Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, No. 38 E/2013, pp. 158-179 Abstract This research explores how communication strategies of supervisors in public organizations influence subordinates’ trust in their supervisors and organization. At present, little public administration research has explored how the pattern of communication influences subordinates’ trust in their supervisors or organization (vertical trust), in detail. As such, this research constructs a conceptual framework of how supervisors’ communication with subordinates can affect vertical trust in public organizations. Using 2010 US Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey Data, this research uses structural equation modeling to empirically assess the aforementioned framework. The broad conclusion drawn is that interpersonal communication strategies are most effective in building vertical trust in public organizations. Keywords: organizational trust, organizational behavior, communication, public organizations. 1. Introduction Levels of trust within an organization are often positively associated with levels of organizational effectiveness and performance (Mayer et al., 1995; Dirks and Ferrin, 2001; Schoorman et al., 2007). Given the positive association found to exist between levels of organizational trust and levels of organizational performance and effectiveness, a large body of research, which relates to public and private sectors, has found it necessary to attempt to better understand how trust is created within organizations (Mayer et al., 1995; Schockley-Zalabak et al., 2000; Huff and Kelley, 2003; Cho and Park, 2011). Through understanding the factors affecting trust within organizations, it is believed that managers and leaders within an organization will be better able to create conditions that are conducive to trust, thereby enhancing levels of organizational performance and effectiveness (Möllering et al., 2004). While several forms of trust have been found to exist within organizations, this research focuses upon vertical trust in particular, which has been explained elsewhere as subordinates’ trust in supervisors and in the organization (Costigan et al., 1998). Previous attempts to clarify the way in which vertical trust is created within organizations tend to focus upon assessing the effects of managerial strategies employed by supervisors when interacting with subordinates (Driscoll, 1978; Gilbert and Tang, 1998; Dirks and Ferrin, 2002). However, there has been no assessment of how supervisors’ strategies of communication influence levels of vertical trust. This lacuna in the existing body of literature is curious, as communication between a supervisor and subordinate has been repeatedly argued to be a factor that greatly influences subordinates’ levels of vertical trust (Gilbert and Tang, 1998; Park and Cho, 2011). This research seeks to build upon the existing body of literature by focusing in particular upon how communication strategies employed by a supervisor serve to influence subordinates’ levels of trust in their supervisor and organizations in the public sector. In public organizations, communication has been found to influence aspects of employee attitudes and behavior such as levels of employee commitment, empowerment, and organizational citizenship behaviors (Wright, 2004; Organ, 1988; Pandey and Garnett 2006; Garnett et al., 2008). Given the findings of previous research, it is likely that the way in which a supervisor communicates with their subordinates may play an important role in influencing levels of vertical trust within public organizations. Despite their high face validity, such arguments have so far escaped in-depth investigation by extant public administration literature (Pandey and Garnnett, 2006). Garnett (1997, p. 10) attributes this lack of attention to communication to a ‘performance predicament’ facing researches in the field of public administration, in that ‘the costs of government communication are generally easier to measure than are its benefits’. Given such a void, this research intends to advance existing knowledge related to factors affecting levels of vertical trust in public organizations by deriving and empirically testing a theoretical framework that can be used to understand how communication strategies employed by supervisors serve to influence levels of vertical trust within public organizations. 159 2. Conceptual overview 2.1. Vertical trust Three perspectives traditionally dominate trust research in public administration (Bouckaert, 2012). First and most prevalent is the environmental perspective, which focuses on citizens’ trust in public administration. Second and much less central is the contrary notion of public administrator’s trust in citizens (the work of Yang (2005) is one of the few exceptions). Finally, the internal organizational perspective (Nyhan, 2000) studies trust within public organizations. In this article, we focus on this last perspective. Within the internal organizational perspective on trust, our specific interest is vertical trust within public organizations, which refers to trust of public servants in their supervisor and their organization. Cho and Park (2011) elaborate on this understanding of vertical trust and explain that a subordinate’s trust in their supervisor can be considered as a form of interpersonal trust, whereas a subordinate’s trust in their organization can be considered a form of institutional trust. The authors concisely justify their explanation; ‘the object of interpersonal trust is a person or group of people, whereas the object of institutional trust is an organizational entity’ (Cho and Park, 2011, pp. 555). Thus, vertical trust is a two dimensional construct, where one dimension reflects a subordinate’s interpersonal trust in their supervisor and the second dimension reflects a subordinate’s institutional trust in their organization. While conceptually, it may be possible for a subordinate to trust their supervisor, but not their organization, or visaversa, generally we may view both forms of trust as interrelated (Wright, 2004); this will be explained in greater detail later. Now that the term vertical trust has (...truncated)