Developing high trust work relationships

# 7 Attitudinal consequences: commitment, job satisfaction, intent to stay

Trust is also linked to a number of attitudinal outcomes, particularly organisational commitment and job satisfaction.

It is widely recognised that managers are responsible for many duties that have a major effect on employees’ job satisfaction, such as performance evaluations, guidance and assistance with job responsibilities, and training.

People are likely to feel safer and more positive about a manager making these decisions when they believe the leader is trustworthy.

In contrast, having a low level of trust in a leader is likely to be psychologically distressing when the leader has power over important aspects of one’s job and this distress is likely to affect one’s attitudes about the workplace.

The implication of this idea is that trust in leadership should be associated with higher levels of job satisfaction, higher organisational commitment and lower intention of quitting.

For instance, when individuals do not trust their leaders, they are more likely to quit or consider quitting, because they may be concerned about decisions that the leaders might make (owing to perceptions of lack of integrity, fairness, honesty, or competence) and not want to put themselves at risk to the leader. Either way, quitting has all the obvious costs associated with turnover, while intention to leave is empirically associated with low levels of engagement and organisational citizenship behaviours.

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