The Roles of Calculative and Relational Trust in Work Transformation the Roles of Calculative and Relational Trust in Work Transformation the Roles of Calculative and Relational Trust in Work Transformation the Roles of Calculative and Relational Trust in Work Transformation

There is a paradox of workplace transformation: It generates trust but first requires trust. New approaches, such as teamwork and pay-for-skills, remain stuck if employees do not trust them enough to participate. We study which employees take courses when a pay-for-skills plan is created in a company but uncertainty remains about the promised rewards. Employees' willingness to take courses affects multi-skilling and teamwork, at the heart of work transformation. This study pursues a calculative versus a relational notion of trust, to distinguish the role of trust in jump-starting and sustaining transformation. We design a survey, based on extensive observation and interviews, to examine the dynamics of trust in a manufacturing setting; our findings are based on responses from 191 employees on 22 teams, which are either not yet transformed or partly transformed. We find that an initial group of employees working in the traditional context of narrow, individualized tasks will take a course if they can calculate an individual probability of gain. In contexts where some of the simpler forms of transformation are offered, such as job rotation, team meetings, and information sharing, the importance of interdependency becomes more salient. Employees in these contexts take courses, not from expected personal gain, but based on their relational trust in teammates. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects for transformation, which may be promising if the paradox can be resolved by the incremental generation of trust, but may warrant caution if some team members continue to withhold participation. TWO FACES OF TRUST: THE ROLES OF CALCULATIVE AND RELATIONAL TRUST IN WORK TRANSFORMATION Introduction A paradox of workplace transformation is that trust is a beneficial, self-reinforcing outcome, but first trust is required for transformation to get underway. The prospects for transformation sometimes appear too dismal because trust can be observed but not created (Sabel 1992). Distrustful employees will not seize opportunities for involvement, but a state of trust cannot easily be forced or cajoled into being. We explore this apparent paradox by drawing on two types of trust that that can be distilled from diverse literatures calculative and relational and demonstrate that each plays a distinct role in work transformation. We show that calculative trust plays a role before transformation is underway so some employees with potential gains will take the risk of involvement, whereas relational trust plays a role where a few of the simpler features of transformation are in place, such as regular team meetings, to create a medium where trustworthiness of others spurs greater involvement. Understood in this multi-faceted way, trust can at once jump-start and sustain transformation. This paper opens by describing work transformation and identifying trust as one of its levers. We introduce two conceptualizations of trust: calculative and relational. We then present the organizational setting in which our ideas about trust evolved through extensive observation and interviews. This inductive approach provide two advantages. First, in keeping with the idea that relational trust is richly embedded in a context, we learned about its nature and mechanisms in a setting we came to know well in order to ground this sometimes diffuse and poetic concept. Second, our in-depth knowledge of transformation enabled us to identify an appropriate, measurable behavioral outcome for study: participation in courses that are part of a pay-for-skills plan. We then present our grounded hypotheses and empirical findings; the findings from our qualitative data on employees' complex assessments of transforamtion are presented elsewhere (Scully and Preuss 1994). We conclude with a discussion of the prospects for continued transformation where some distrust persists. Transformation Transformed or flexible work practices include teamwork, job rotation, multi-skilling, cross-training, and pay-for-skills, which together constitute a new way of coordinating, monitoring, and rewarding labor. These new practices have been hailed from various quarters both for their improvements in productivity and quality and for their enrichment of employees' work lives. The spread of transformed work practices across organizations has been documented. The definition of adoption and measures of the extent of diffusion are subjects of debate and refinement (Appelbaum and Batt 1994, Bailey and Merritt 1992, Cutcher-Gershenfeld 1991, Osterman 1994). Even when organizations adopt transformed practices, internal diffusion is intermittent (Osterman 1994). While human resource professionals may aver their company's use of flexible practices on a survey, the presence of structures does not determine employee participation in the new practices, particularly because these practices rely upon employees' willing contribution of effort and involvement in a team setting (e.g., Donnellon 1996). Individuals must adopt new behaviors, responsibilities, and relationships for the new practices to deliver on their promises. Trust is cast in a supporting role in the development of empowered, self-directed teams (Golembiewski and McConkie 1975, Larson and LaFasto 1989). Ideas about trust are also evoked to explain why these new practices, like quality circles in previous decades (Cole 1989), diffuse slowly and are difficult to sustain, despite their great promise. In particular, engaging in training and participating in transformed work practices appear to require some form of trust from employees. From an employee's perspective, the time horizon is long in many pay-for-skills plans, from investing in skills to realizing an increase in pay and status. An employee's trust in new reward systems requires trust that the pay-for-skills plan will continue to exist, even though pay plans are known to change frequently, and that the eventual exchange of their skills for more pay will be made good. This paper looks inside an organization to learn which employees choose to become involved in training, an action that is encouraged by increasingly popular pay-for-skills incentive plans (e.g., Lawler and Ledfordl987) and is a crucial foundation of job rotation, multi-skilling, and teamwork. Training is designed to develop new employee skills, enabling employees' participation as full members in team operations and creating the means for transformed workplaces to achieve their predicted performance outcomes. The study of which employees engage voluntarily in training is an excellent window into understanding the halting diffusion of transformed practices inside organizations. The transformed workplace also requires greater trust of employees on the part of their supervisors. Transformed practices involve voluntary effort and limited monitoring, conditions where trust in mutual gains is thought to be the bulwark against opportunism. Top-down trust and the conditions that encourage it, particularly during crises or uncertainty, have been well characterized in the literature (e.g., Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman 1995). The literature on incentive alignments also addresses trust from a top-down perspective, sometimes implicitly as a problematic residual that indicates the vulnerability of principals to the actions of agents when trust must substitute for clear alignment. The prospects for transformation depend not only on whether supervisors' levels of trust allow them to share decision-making but also on whether employees trust the entire change project and the required departures from familiar if problematic modes of operating. Transformation is designed to motivate participation from employees, who may be reluctant to trust the new work practices and reward systems or the managers who champion them, especially if they have long labored under a more authoritarian set of rules. We focus on bottom-up trust as a lynchpin of