Trust and Organizational Performance
The recent explosion of research on organizational performance has produced at least three important benefits for public management scholarship. First, it has generated general frameworks for assessing performance (e.g., Heinrich and Lynn 2000; Rainey and Steinbauer 1999). Second, it has generated high-quality empirical assessments of performance (Brewer 2005; Brewer and Selden 2000; Jennings and Ewalt 1998; Meier and O’Toole 2002; Selden and Sowa 2004). Third, it has generated comprehensive summaries identifying the most important factors explaining performance (Boyne 2003). As a rule, this impressive body of work does not consider a role for trust (see Lundin [2007] for an exception). This is not to say that public management scholars have ignored the concept of trust altogether. Only that when we focus on trust within public organizations, it is viewed as a dependent variable to be explained (Carnevale and Wechsler 1992; Gilbertand Tang 1998) or as a theoretically important but untested factor contributing to organizationaloutcomes (Behn 1995; Carnevale 1995).4Trust is featured more prominently in models of organizational performance in the private sector (e.g., Dirks and Ferrin 2002; Kanter and Mirvis 1989; Zand 1972). This literature distinguishes between interpersonal trust (i.e., trust between members of the same organization) and interorganizational trust (i.e., trust in one organization by members of another organization) (Zaheer, McEvily, and Perrone 1998). A substantial body of research finds that interpersonal trust is positively related to several measures of organizational outcomes (see Whitener et al. [1998] and Kramer [1999] for good reviews). Empirical evidence also links interorganizational trust to a greater willingness to participate in and higher performance from interfirm cooperative agreements (Muthusamy and White 2005; Webber 2002; Zaheer et al 1998). A fair summarization of this literature is that trust may influence organizational performance via three avenues: decreasing transaction costs, encouraging organizational citizenship behaviors, and promoting voluntary deference (Kramer.۱۹۹۹).
حرکت به سوی بهبود و تعالی یک سفر بی پایان است. تعالی همیشه قله ای است که ما از جایی که ایستاده ایم در افق دید خود می بینیم. هرچه افق دید ما وسیع تر و اندیشه ما متعالی تر می گردد قله های جدیدتری نیز در منظر دیده گان ما ظاهر می شوند.