Trustworthiness is a critical component of organizational success. This is particularly true of the 21st century workplace, where internal discussion of contentious issues related to climate change, racism, unionization, and other divisive topics is quickly becoming a norm. When these discussions lead to disagreement, they can break the trust that exists between staff and leaders. That loss of trust can also have a negative impact on public perceptions of an organization’s trustworthiness.

These difficulties are particularly pronounced in the museum sector. Like other cultural institutions, museums are increasingly being called upon to address broader social and environmental questions, along with contentious issues related to their own operations. As museums have traditionally thought of themselves as neutral ground, these calls pose a challenge to their very identities. They underscore the urgent need for strategies that allow museums to address contentious issues in ways that build, maintain, and restore trust between staff and leaders.

In response to this need, we launched a project called Cultures of Trust. The project is supported by the Innovation Resource Center for Human Resources, and is guided by the following question:

What are the interactions around contentious issues that facilitate, sustain, or detract from trust between museum leaders and museum staff?

To address this question, we’re drawing on two theoretical frameworks:

• Experiential Trust, which can be used to measure how trust between individuals changes over time.
• Complex Adaptive Systems, which provides a framework for understanding how individual interactions affect trust within organizations.

Over a period of two years, we worked with our partners at the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) and the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) to develop strategies for building, maintaining, and repairing trust between museum leaders and staff when contentious issues enter the workplace. Through a literature review, an analysis of news stories, and interviews with museum professionals, we generated practical, actionable insights that directly apply to museum professionals’ experiences and contexts — and that also contribute to broader discussions about management and trust in nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Project Outputs

Project results can be found in the following blog posts:

• “When Leader-Staff Trust Breaks Down” – an analysis of the news media’s coverage of leader-staff disputes, in which we identify the components of trust that most often come into play when contentious issues arise in museum workplaces.
• “Building Leader-Staff Trust in Nonprofit Organizations” – a review of the academic literature that identifies key strategies for fostering employee trust in nonprofit organizations.
• “Building and Repairing Leader-Staff Trust in Times of Workplace Conflict” – a discussion of trust-building actions leaders can take to improve the health of their organizations, based on interviews with children’s museum executives all across the US.
• “Employee Assessments of Leader Trustworthiness” – a study of how employees assess leader trustworthiness under a variety of workplace conditions, based on a survey of non-managerial staff in the non-profit arts, culture, and leisure sectors.

About This Article

Cultures of Trust is supported by a grant from the Innovation Resource Center for Human Resources. To learn more about our work on trust and trustworthiness, see our “Trust 101” explainer along with blog posts on partnerships and trust-building, public trust in zoos and aquariums, and our moral motives conference. You can also take a look at our trustworthiness framework. For more on how our work could help improve leader-staff trust in your organization, please contact CEO Joanna Laursen Brucker at joannalb@knology.org.

Photo courtesy of Todd Trapani