Trust Processes in the Eye of the Storm: How Do We Cope with Salient Vulnerability?

Disruptive change has become a trademark of the post-financial crisis era. Many organisations are facing extremely challenging austerity-based situations, affecting and disrupting their business model and their institutional logic, and leaving employees vulnerable to job threat. The UK public sector is a particular case in point as it has already faced a series of dramatic budget cuts (up to 25-30%) (Responsibility 2010, Conway, et al. 2014), and is now entering a second round of further substantive retrenchment (an additional 25-40% reduction in institutions’ budgets). These cuts have produced a different and diminished scale and scope of the public sector within the UK economy, with the next round anticipated to create further profound and enduring changes, which threaten public sector employees in a number of substantive ways. In such dramatic situations, employee trust, i.e. the willingness of employees to accept vulnerability based on positive beliefs (Mayer, et al. 1995), is an important means of coping with these accelerating uncertainties.