Many companies monitor employee behavior in order to boost productivity, and this practice has become increasingly prevalent during the pandemic. However, greater oversight can be interpreted by employees as a signal of distrust and potentially have unintended negative consequences. Recent experimental research shows that employees do in fact penalize actions that they view as expressions of distrust and, conversely, reward actions that they view as expressions of trust. The benefits of trusting extend beyond the dyad itself (i.e., the manager who trusts and the employee who is trusted), since trust relationships have a transitive logic and spread organically through organizations.
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Marc A. Cohen
Seattle University
Marc A. Cohen is the Genevieve Albers Professor of Management at the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University, with a shared appointment in the Department of Philosophy. His research on trust, social theory, and ethics has been published in both...
Mathew S. Isaac
Seattle University
Mathew S. Isaac is a Professor in the Department of Marketing at the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University. His research on consumer judgment and decision making, which examines how contextual and motivational factors influence product...
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