Trust issues: Why suspicion is beneficial for businesses

It is often said that trust is the key to success in business. That customer loyalty leads to repeat sales, and that internal suspicions can stifle a team’s productivity, is widely accepted.

 

But recent research in the journal Group Decision and Negotiation suggests that an atmosphere of distrust within working groups can actually boost output, by encouraging members to scrutinise their work more closely. So, how can a manager tell when to put a cat among the pigeons?

 

The study asked groups of students to collaborate on their homework, with some of the groups being told that a team member had been assigned to sabotage the work, thereby fostering a sense of distrust. The teams who suspected that they had been infiltrated performed better than groups where trust remained intact. 

 

The researchers concluded that “distrust creates an increased awareness and need to question, which is manifested through a reduced willingness to rely on the responses of others, and increased need to check their work.” However, they do not recommend that managers foster distrust within a group unnecessarily. Instead, bosses should encourage critical thought within teams by reorganising them periodically and bringing in new members to shake things up. 

 

Trust may only be beneficial for teams where close collaboration is integral to the work being done. In contrast, research has indicated that, if the functions of each team member are quite distinct, camaraderie could be detrimental to performance. 

 

A different study by Claus Langfred, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Olin School of Business, found that the performance of teams whose members work independently is poorer when there are higher levels of trust. “In these self-managing teams, people can make the mistaken assumption that trust can be a substitute for monitoring,” said Langfred. “They think, ‘We really trust each other a lot; we don’t need to monitor each other’. The reality is, you need a minimum level of monitoring to ensure productivity.” He suggests that managers exercise a degree of oversight over groups of autonomous workers, rather than allowing members to monitor themselves.

 

Trust can become a problem for teams when reaching a consensus is equated with progress. The collapse of Enron in 2001 is often held up as a warning against the dangers of “groupthink” – where a group’s desire for conformity ensures bad business practices go unchecked, and constructive criticism is treated as dissent. As Glenn Dickson, a for­mer Enron risk man­ager, revealed to ABC News in 2002: “the pres­sure was, you just didn’t have a choice but to approve the deals once every­body had their heart set on that deal closing.” 

 

The irony of groupthink is that the team’s shared view is an illusion, but nobody trusts their fellow members to treat their criticisms as anything other than wilfully damaging. 

 

Too much trust may lead to sloppiness, but managers shouldn’t incite rivalries and competition within teams as a means of driving results. In Organisational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein says that a feeling of “psychological safety” is integral to the development of individuals within a team. He argues that people will not learn new skills and information if they fear criticism or derision from their colleagues. “Learning anxiety”, as Schein calls it, can only be overcome if team members feel the freedom to fail, and are comfortable learning from their mistakes and from colleagues’ guidance.