Trust and Moral Typecasting in Leader-Staff Relations

To build and maintain internal organization trust, staff and leaders need to see each other as both thinking and feeling creatures.

by John VoiklisElliott Bowen

May 29, 2025

At the 2025 American Alliance of Museums (AAM) conference, we had an opportunity to present findings from our ongoing Culture of Trust project. Attending the conference also gave us a chance to do some real-time, on-the-ground research — specifically in terms of the kinds of behaviors that museum professionals associate with trust. Building off of the literature review and media analysis we’ve already conducted, in this blog post, we wanted to share what we learned at our AAM session.

During our presentation, we conducted two small-group sessions: one that dealt with museum leaders’ behaviors, and a second focusing on staff behaviors. For each, we asked participants to describe what it looks like when leaders and staff exhibit sincerity, integrity, or benevolence (that is, the moral qualities of trust) in their interactions with each other. As a follow up, we asked participants to indicate which of these three qualities they were most interested in exploring and working on in the workplace.

Divergent Views of Leader and Staff Trustworthiness

Responses to these questions revealed that when it comes to the question of what constitutes trustworthy behaviors, leaders see themselves very differently than they see staff. When speaking about qualities they value in staff, leaders emphasized the importance of competence and reliability — that is, ability-based trust criteria. For many of the museum leaders at our presentation, the “feeling” side of trustworthiness (for example, demonstrating compassion or warmth in interactions) was deemed less important for staff than the “thinking“ side. When asked why this was the case, leaders indicated that they already assume staff are coming to their jobs as emotional beings — indeed, so much so that some were critical of the idea of employees bringing their personal values into the workplace.

By contrast, when talking about themselves, leaders indicated that staff primarily see them as thinking creatures. According to those we heard from, it is common for staff to assume that leaders come into their work as both competent and reliable. Because of this, leaders told us, staff assessments of leader trustworthiness tend to overlook leaders’ emotional needs — for example, the fact that leaders can sometimes be victimized. Although they’re expected to demonstrate sincerity, integrity, and benevolence, leaders said that their own existence as feeling creatures tends to be downplayed in staff assessments of their trustworthiness.

Social scientists would call this an example of moral typecasting. The tendency to view people as either “thinking doers” or “vulnerable feelers” has been documented in many different professions. In medicine, for example, physicians are often seen as intelligent and capable healers, but not as people who might themselves need help — a phenomenon that threatens both the physical and mental health of an entire class of professionals. Similarly, when members of the military become veterans, they may face diminished career prospects on account of the belief that soldiers are primarily agentic (that is, having the ability to plan and act) and thus lacking in experience (in other words, having the ability to feel emotions).

As these examples suggest, moral typecasting is often an obstacle to personal wellbeing and professional success. On an organizational level, the idea that people who are high in agency (thinking) must be low in experience (feeling) can also create a barrier to building trust in the workplace. The dichotomy of high-warmth / low-competence (i.e., the “lovable fool”) and low-warmth / high competence (i.e., the “competent jerk”) limits our ability to see others in all their complexity — and by extension, to empathize with them. When leaders are seen only as moral agents, they may believe themselves to be impervious to the effects of others’ actions, overestimate their own abilities, and neglect the need for self-care, down-time and “thoughtful reflection on [their] mistakes to improve.” By the same token, when staff are seen only as moral patients, they may overlook their ability to take actions that improve internal organizational trust.

Ultimately, both of these outcomes are dehumanizing. When we see another person as being strong in either warmth or competence, we tend to assume they are weak in the other area — even to the extent of seeking out information that aligns with this assumption. And when we judge someone to be lacking in either area, it can take a long time to correct our initial assessments — particularly where warmth is concerned.

An Alternative Approach

A week after attending the AAM conference, we were in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the 2025 InterActivity conference, hosted by the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM). While there, we attended a presentation called “De-Escalation Training for Front Line Staff,” which was given by Lynnsey Childress-Wimp at Discovery Lab (a children’s museum in Tulsa, OK). The goal of the session was to help participants recognize and effectively respond to disorderly or tense situations on the floor. Those in attendance learned how children’s museums can collaborate with police departments or other organizations well-versed in de-escalation strategies to create training events that use scenario-based role playing to teach employees how to deal with confrontational visitors and conflicts on the floor.

During the presentation, it became clear to us that the Discovery Lab’s approach to de-escalation training is one that recognizes staff as both agents and patients. The idea for training originated in floor staff’s safety and security concerns. As Childress-Wimp explained, staff were worried not just about their ability to handle “minor skirmishes” on the floor, but also about the role that their own innate biases might be playing in decisions about whether to report potentially suspicious behavior. The training Discovery Lab provides both recognizes and honors those feelings. So too does it reflect staff members’ ideas. Training sessions are participant-driven; as Childress-Wimp put it, “staff inform what we train on.” The fact that staff are given a say in management-related decisions and policy setting demonstrates Discovery Lab’s commitment to enhancing staff agency. Not surprisingly, the training sessions have gone extremely well. Childress-Wimp observed that after conducting two or three sessions in their first year, there was an immediate improvement in staff satisfaction — along with improved feelings of staff security.

Let’s Put it to Work

Participating in the AAM and ACM conferences gave us a deeper understanding of how trust works in museum settings. Through presenting our work and attending others’ sessions, we saw firsthand how moral typecasting can create obstacles to trust building. As the work of Tulsa’s Discovery Lab makes clear, there are ways staff and leaders can recognize each other as both agents and patients. But on a broader level, we’re wondering: how does this play out in other museums and other settings?

Now that we’ve returned from these conferences, we’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the three following questions:

To what extent does moral typecasting inform the way leaders and staff see each other in your workplace?
How is the tendency to see leaders as agents and staff as patients impacting internal trust within your organization?
If moral typecasting is a barrier to trust building, then how might we overcome this barrier?

To provide input on these questions, you can get in touch with us at media@knology.org, or simply leave a comment below!

The literature on warmth and competence judgments contains a number of suggestions for how we might get around the problem of moral typecasting. As one study on the subject puts it:

To avoid making biased warmth and competence judgments, people must be mindful to try to avoid taking shortcuts…managers should push themselves to be aware of how they form impressions — by trying to avoid sizing people up on the basis of stereotypical perceptions of warmth and competence, and by separating the two dimensions, understanding that it is not a zero sum game: warmth and competence are not mutually exclusive.

In practical terms, this means asking ourselves questions like the following:

If I perceive someone as warm, is that perception causing me to make potentially erroneous assessments of their competence?
By contrast, if I see someone as cold, is my judgment of their competence more assumed than real?
When in leadership positions, what can I do to prioritize warmth in my interactions with others, knowing that this is more important than projecting competence?