I had to do an essay on trust for Uni the other day. I wasn’t too interested. So much research says the same thing: Trust is good, develop trust within your team and you will be more successful, more productive, slimmer, richer, more likely to attract white doves, babies will stop crying when you smile at them, etc etc.
So I started poking around looking for something that was off the beaten track, left field of most of the fanatical trust findings. As it turns out, there’s some good stuff out there.
Claus Langfred in 2004 decided to take a counter-intuitive approach and investigate what happens when teams have too much trust ie. when trust exceeds trustworthiness. In looking at 71 teams, Langfred found that high levels of trust resulted in low levels of monitoring. As this autonomy increased, team members were more often than not satisfying self interest rather than bothering to contribute. A couple of studies by authors including McEvily et al (’03), Barney and Hansen (’94) and Szulanski (’04) demonstrate that trust in someone results in lower levels of vigilance and creates a bias where you give that person the benefit of the doubt. This reduces the chances of you thoroughly screening the info you receive. In turn, you become complacent, and the quality of information you or your team receive decreases. The best research usually turns out to stuff that seems so obvious once you hear it.
Social Engineers use these concepts regarding too much trust against us. One of the most famous of these engineers is Kevin Mitnick, who defined Social Engineering as the act of manipulating people to perform acts or disclose information that can rely on establishing trust between parties. Mitnick didn’t know how to hack a password or backdoor his way into a server – he just got info from people by gently teasing it out of them.
Say you have a long lost friend or relative ring up. They went to school with you or played on your team a couple of years ago. They’re best friends with your partner. They make sure to ask how your dog Fido or was it Patches is going. Suddenly there’s a quick build up of trust, and you’re more than happy to give that person the benefit of the doubt when they get your dogs name wrong. You smile to yourself and correct the person on the phone – your dog’s name is Lassie. Bingo! The Social Engineer hits the jackpot – a fair percentage of passwords are related to pet names, and there’s a good chance your password is lassie1, lassie1234, or has a last name, like LassieRayner.
So while there’s a dark side to trust, most balanced research seems to suggest that organisations find a balance between too much trust (or an overinvestment in trust) when groupthink takes over and not enough trust where no one wants to share anything and there’s a loss of information between parties as everyone holds their cards close to their body. This implies an optimum level of trust exists – but trust is a dynamic and changing variable with a very unclear boundary between not enough and too much. The answer? Add just a little distrust to the equation – don’t take everything from those you trust as the gospel, and if you’re in a team, at least do a little monitoring of them once in a while.
Hello to all - I’m a little sorry I don’t update this more but I’m stuck between apathy and a busy place. I’m off to Karratha, WA on an Elec Eng. job. As the Englishman I’m working with might say – It’s well far away!
Enjoy this? If you want to take action, subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe to free email updates for The New Man Of Action!
