Why Trust Matters in Teams

Entities (e.g., organizations, teams, or individuals) involved in ongoing exchange relationships are vulnerable to each other. The parties can respond to that vulnerability in some combination of the following two ways. First, control helps to mitigate vulnerability by prescribing and regulating expected behaviors and sanctioning actions that violate expectations. Second, trust means accepting vulnerability to another based on positive expectations about their behaviors. Trust, therefore, serves as an efficient and effective substitute for control in exchange relationships where parties are vulnerable to one another.

Teams are vulnerable to members due to the harm that members might cause to other members and to the team overall. For example, a member’s incompetent or deviant behavior might threaten the survival or reputation of the team. Similarly, freeriding or self-interested behaviors might harm team performance. Teams, therefore, need to respond to that vulnerability by controlling or trusting members. It is widely agreed that trust is essential to the effective functioning of teams because the cost of control (i.e., time and energy) reduces the efficiency of teamwork. Understanding how teams build trust with newcomers is essential to the scholarly and practical understanding of how high-functioning teams are created and maintained.

Building Trust with Newcomers

Our paper, published in the Journal of Management Studies, discusses how teams develop trust with newcomers during socialization. In the paper, we describe socialization as a process of control designed to prescribe, regulate, and sanction the behavior of newcomers as they learn the ropes of the organization and workgroup. Doing so helps to provide some explanation about how control might help to build trust, as well as how trust might serve as a substitute for control. It is well-established in organizational research that actors respond to vulnerability through control, that control leads to predictability, and that behaving predictably leads to trust. By examining how teams develop trust with newcomers during socialization, we uncover specific mechanisms through which context affects team vulnerability, team vulnerability manifests into control over newcomers, and newcomer responses to team control help to build trust over time.

We suggest that team vulnerability is a function of the work context in which the team performs. Teams often respond to that vulnerability by implementing control over members, which simultaneously protects the team from harm and tests the trustworthiness of prospective members. Socialization affords a newcomer with opportunities to demonstrate their trustworthiness by behaving in expected and acceptable ways. Over time, adhering to expectations allows the team to gradually replace control with trust until a newcomer is considered a full member. In some cases, a newcomer may fail to adhere to expectations and become viewed as untrustworthy, ultimately finding themselves under less costly forms of control such as alienation and exclusion.

Lessons from Hazing

In the paper, we bring our theorizing to life with lessons from workplace hazing. Hazing is a temporary, ritualistic socialization practice that serves to assess newcomer fit with the team. Examples of hazing might include the use of derogatory nicknames, such as cherry or newbie, to marginalize new employees, or pressuring newcomers to complete menial or degrading tasks like coffee runs or cleaning the breakroom microwave. We argue that these tasks protect the team from harm by reducing the discretion of newcomers, as well as test newcomer commitment and conformity to team expectations. Newcomers who respond appropriately are viewed as fitting into the team and eventually are granted full group membership as trusted insiders. Those who resist the hazing process are viewed as less trustworthy and, if they continue to resist, are placed into an excluded subgroup, or leave the team. We suggest, therefore, that hazing serves as an aggrandized form of control during socialization that accelerates trust-building from the team perspective.

The Risk for Management

The dangers of hazing are well-documented. Hazing can serve as a cover for bullying and harassment, and the many reported instances (e.g., lawsuits) of race- and gender-based harassment of newcomers may support these claims. The news is replete with stories of appalling hazing rituals and catastrophic outcomes for organizations. For example, Goldman Sachs recently settled a lawsuit with an intern who claimed that the company fostered a culture of excessive hazing abuses (Dzhanova, 2021). As a result of these egregious and public cases, policymakers and organizational leaders are adopting anti-hazing rules. Today, 44 of 50 states have anti-hazing legislation, and nearly all federal, state, and local employers have prohibited hazing.

We argue that hazing may serve a functional role in establishing early trust in teams that perceive themselves as highly vulnerable. Managers who remove hazing as an option may create conflict between control emplaced by the organization over the team (i.e., anti-hazing policy) and the team’s ability to enact control over newcomers until trust can be established. It should be of concern to managers considering anti-hazing policies that zero-tolerance rules, much like other forms of strict organizational control, might push behaviors out of managerial view. Doing so could then actually increase the risk of adverse or even catastrophic outcomes (e.g., death of a newcomer or lawsuits). In our paper, we argue that scholars and practitioners should consider how functional socialization processes might be adopted to replace hazing in a way that sufficiently mitigates team vulnerability until trust can be developed with newcomers.

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