4 June 2007
Transparent companies are more trusted, survey finds
Research proves link between corporate openness and employees' belief in the companies they work for.
A web-based survey of over 400 US healthcare workers has found statistical evidence for a link between how open companies are and how much their employees trust them.
The study asked employees across all parts of the business questions about trust and transparency.
The study, run by Dr Brad Rawlins of Brigham Young University's Department of Communication, asked employees across all parts of the business questions about trust and transparency.
Measuring trust
Rawlins adopted questions that measured willingness to trust an organization based on three key components:
- Integrity: Is the organization fair and just?
- Goodwill: Does the organization care about me?
- Competence: Does the organization have the ability to do what it says it will?
Rawlins' questions to measure perceptions of organizational transparency stood on four components:
- Information provided: Is it truthful, substantial and reliable?
- Stakeholder participation: Identifying what sort of information they need and want.
- Accountability: For what the organization does and says, including mistakes.
- Secretiveness: A "reverse item" measuring the opposite of openness and expected to show a negative correlation to transparency.
From this study, one could conclude that as organizations become more transparent, they'll also become more trusted.
Positive correlation
The
survey results showed a trust and transparency correlation of .75, a number high enough to provide
strong evidence that a transparent organization is trusted, and vice versa.
While the study only looked at employees, Rawlins believes the statistical evidence is strong enough to be applied to other stakeholder groups as well. "From this study, one could conclude that as organizations become more transparent, they'll also become more trusted," he says.
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