Managing Trust

Bottery, M. (2003). 'The management and mismanagement of trust.' Educational Management & Administration, 31(3), 245-261.*

Bottery (2003) argues for a return to centre stage of the topic of 'trust'. He argues that trust and being trusted are central issues in the recognition of a person's integrity and humanity, and that non-recognition:

can lead to hostility, the dramatic lowering of morale, and problems with sustaining teacher numbers. (p. 248)

Bottery writes that there are seven different forms of trust.

Calculative trust	To take a variety of factors into account and make a judgment that someone will do something that is beneficial to us.
Practice trust	Repeated encounters increase the amount of knowledge about a person, and therefore facilitate more accurate calculations concerning an individual's trustworthiness. This also involves the creation of interpersonal bonds in relationships which have ethical and affective components.
Role trust	Applied to groups of people or to professional groups who are seen to possess the same cultural role, value codes and ethical commitments.
Identificatory trust	A level of interpersonal commitment such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; where two people begin to act as one.
Meso-level trust	Belief in the culture and ethos of organisations - organisational underpinnings for personal and interpersonal relationships.
Macro-level trust	Belief in the culture and ethos of society. Societal and cultural underpinnings for personal and interpersonal relationships.
Existential trust	Belief in the rightness of the world - underpinned by support from our broad community.

Not all interpersonal transactions need trust to be developed to the highest level. However, relationships with developed trust are qualitatively better, more meaningful, more caring, more respectful and have more integrity. 'These are spiritual goods virtually all would value' (p. 254).

Loss of trust has emotional consequences. This can occur at a personal level, for example, in a marriage. However, as the framework of seven forms of trust suggests, it can also occur at other levels. For example, role trust can be undermined if policy-makers question the values and ethics of a professional group (such as teachers). This in turn can lead to deepening cycles of distrust between the professional group and the policy-makers. Distrust of politicians and the media are examples at the macro-level.

Bottery specifically considers the loss of trust between teachers, on the one side, and government, on the other. He proposes a number of measures to take in order to generate an upward spiral of trust.

On the government side

Public recognition of the value of teachers.
A recognition of teachers' heavy workloads, followed by a substantive move to remedy this.
The replacing of demands for written planning evidence (a calculative trust accountability mechanism) with evidence of student progression.
Accountability mechanisms containing more practice trust, such as greater acceptance of teachers' qualitative judgments.
Greater role trust, allowing educationalists greater freedom in decision making.
Research to investigate the effects of a greater degree of trust being vested in teaching professionals.

On the educationalists' side

Strong evidence of workloads and what is needed to counteract overwork.
Commitment to providing evidence of monitoring student progression.
The creation of explicit values and ethical commitments, and sanctions if those commitments are broken.
Research into how educationalists can educate others about educational matters.

(Condensed from Bottery, 2003, pp. 257-258)

* This journal has now changed its name to Educational Management, Administration & Leadership.