Trust in turbulent times: Organizational change and the consequences for Intra-Organizational trust

This chapter explores trust in the context of significant corporate change. The context for the study is nine organizations experiencing significant amounts of corporate change. The chapter explores the levels of trust held by different cultural groupings. In particular, it examines trust in cultural groupings based on job grading, age and length of service, highlighting in particular how trust in the employer appears to decline based on length of service. The chapter also investigates the difference in trust levels between employees and managers within their local subcultures and the same employeesʹ trust in their employer and senior management. The chapter explores whether local culture engenders a level of trust in line management which the broader organizational culture cannot deliver particularly at times of transformational change. The chapter interweaves illustrative qualitative material from three of the organizations researched with the overall survey results from the full sample. We start the chapter by showing how critical trust is to the successful implementation of change programmes, before going on to argue that, despite this criticality, change-programme design fails to take account of varying attitudes and perceptions within different cultural groupings and at different cultural levels. We then present the research questions that guided our analysis before describing the methods we used to collect data, and then presenting and discussing the results.