How Trust Affects Interpersonal Relationships MGT 521 Management June 15, 2010 Dr. Michael A. Barker SPHR Teck-Hua Hohas, with Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, California, and Keith Weigelt, with The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania conducted a laboratory investigation entitled Trust Building Among strangers, (MANAGEMENT SCIENCE, vol.
51, NO. 4, April 2005, pp. 519-530, tssn 0025-1909 etssn 1526-5501 05 5104 0519).The article directly relates to the experience of working within a newly established learning team, and establishing trust among team members.
The laboratory based investigation was structured in the form of a multistage game entitled: The Trust Building Game (Ho & Weigelt, 2005), whereas the players had to opportunity to achieve social gains only if the players trust each other in each stage, without knowing the identity of the other players. The theory of the game 'assumes all players are opportunistic and untrustworthy and thus should zero trust for others' (Ho & Weigelt, 2005).Trust Building Game (Ho & Weigelt, 2005) examines how the intentions of those who trust others affect credibility, if people are trusting or trustworthiness, and the evolution of rust. The question was asked: "When working in teams, is trust assumed or do team members have to earn trust? " (MGT 521 Management Course Syllabus, University of Phoenix, 2010, p 14).
The concept of trust, especially among strangers was viewed by social sciences, psychologist, sociologist, and economists.Their opinions varied from some psychologists viewing trust as being the hallmark of social adjustment (Gurtman 1992) and that without it neuroses prevail. ' (Ho ; Weigelt, 2005), to some economists viewing trust 'rationally and posit people only trust when it pays hem to do so' (Ho ; Weigelt, 2005), (Camerer and Weigelt 1988, Berg et al. 1995). The results from The Trust Building Game, (Ho ; Weigelt, 2005), demonstrated that players were more willing to trust when they felt certain of the other players' intention, and more reluctant to trust in later stages of the game.Therefore, when working in teams, trust is initially assumed.
As the team continues to work together, trust is either gained or discharged. During the Trust Building Game, (Ho & Weigelt, 2005), although the majority of the players were not able to claim the entire prize of he social gains, there was some degree of trusting behaviors. Now let us consider how to keep or rebuild trust among team members, when trust is lost while working in teams. Trust is typically lost among team members over time through a series of missed obligations, in addition to poor and/or affect the entire team effort, project outcome, and bottom line.
Because of the increased in interdependencies among organizations worldwide, it is likely that work arounds due to the lack of team trust will incur costs for the organizations in the form of lost productivity, duplicated, wasted, or reworked tasks (Willard, 1999). Therefore, once team trust becomes an issue, each team member must commit to taking take another risk in the team relationship, thereby allowing each member to become vulnerable to one another.Vital to team trust are dependence, reliance, and faith. Therefore, this sincere offer of vulnerability each team member brings to rebuilding the team relationships is a critical element in the trust building process (Willard, 1999). At this time, each member must be able to admit to prior mistakes, and commit to continually checking with team members about assumptions and new ommitments in addition to regularly checking-in to keep the team relationship on track.
References Willard, M. (1999).
