Employees´ Trust in Managers in a Downsized Organisation

Abstract: Trust is important to establish a good relationship between employees and managers in an organization. For the modern organization, trust is important to be able to survive and be successful in the long run. We believe that the employees are the key players, which the organization relies on to create value and to be competitive in the market. The purpose of the dissertation was to find out, how the managers worked with the internal factors affecting trust during a downsizing process and to compare the findings with the employees’ level of trust in the managers. To be able to measure the level of trust, we created the COCR-model, which we used when we analysed the data from the survey. The result of the survey showed that the employees had some trust in the managers, and that the managers had worked actively with almost all internal factors that were measured in the COCR-model. Our conclusion is that there are external factors affecting employees’ trust in managers as well. These external factors could be one explanation why the employees in our case study had some trust in their managers, even when they had experienced a downsizing. According to us this is an irrational behaviour, which becomes rational only when the external factors are considered.