Trust is an essential ingredient needed in people management and leadership. This cannot be over-emphasised because the lack of trust in leadership weakens the foundation of attaining organisational goals and vision.
It is a sure recipe for leadership and organisational failure. Developing trust in leadership is an important requirement in building team unity, cohesion, and positive emotions to push the team and corporate vision since trust is the ‘currency’ for the ‘purchase’ of emotions. Positive emotions from individuals in a team are signals of team success. Building effective and winning teams demands effective relationships and rapport between leaders and followers. Trust makes employees feel credible, respected and fairly treated.
In sub-Saharan African countries, where there is a high unemployment rate, and the labour force has so much exceeded demand, some employers and leaders view their employees as fortunate to be employed by them. Without the organisation, they wouldn’t have a life. This assertion makes organisational leaders not value their employees and do not care or even have empathy towards them. This creates a rigid relationship between organisational leaders and employees, where leaders choose transactional leadership to favour their ideas instead of an inspirational and transformational form of leadership.
The foundational factor for organisational human resource downsizing is that leadership views employees as costs or liabilities that should be reduced
These leaders believe in results and do not care about the feelings or how employees will produce the results and even do not adequately equip the employees with the tools required to perform effectively. If the employees get results, they are rewarded. Those who do not get results are punished and sometimes laid off because leaders believe that the labour market is congested, which is a fact in most African countries.
Organisational leaders must see people as business partners. The foundational factor for organisational human resource downsizing is that leadership views employees as costs or liabilities that should be reduced. Another direction of viewpoint by leadership that is not customarily revealed or communicated is the one that sees employees as assets which need continuous investment to perform. These leadership ideologies are crucial not because they influence executives to downsize but because they usually affect how employees value themselves and how they perform.
The alternative is the other view which has been tried and tested to be effective by some prominent organisations. Leadership must first hire people they can trust, see and deal with as partners in business. This way, organisational leaders know that without the employees, they can’t function and attain their goals, which is true because business owners cannot run their businesses and perform all the functions. The business owner alone cannot run a manufacturing company and do all the activities independently.
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Business owners will need people to help them attain their goals and vision and individual employees to reach their goals. If organisational leaders see employees as business partners, they will value employee input and care and compensate them fairly. This will foster the relationship between leadership and employees. People develop positive emotions and trust leaders who value them. Employee turnover increases organisational costs because leaders must invest time, capital, and other resources to train new employees to fit into their organisational roles.
Organisational leaders must be transparent and communicate clearly and effectively. Research experts say transparency is measured as an organisation’s perceived quality of shared information towards its employees. They concluded that transparent and positive leaders build trust in their followers. The research tested a hypothesis with three hundred and four respondents assigned various conditions to examine how transparency in leadership will affect how employees will trust their leaders using the downsizing scenario. However, it is pertinent to note that there is a critical challenge for organisational leaders to earn the trust of their followers.
Communication and actions, and inactions mainly drive transparency in leadership. Transparent, clear, and effective communication signals authentic employee engagement even though leadership cannot communicate all information to employees since some organisational information remains confidential at the highest leadership level. Employees need to know what they need to know to be comfortable.
It is disastrous for employees to discover that their leaders are hiding sensitive information. This can cause tension, confusion, and mistrust. Transparency is crucial in developing, managing, and maintaining fruitful relationships between leadership and employees, and it is a nurturing ground for cultivating trust in relationships.
Mainly, when management has a policy of compensating employees with financial benefits when they can exceed targets, they sometimes delay these benefits without communicating the reasons for the delay, leaving employees agitated. This creates opportunities for employees to be impatient and become aggressive on the verge of finding answers to the hanging questions.
All information employees need to know must be delivered effectively and timely to eliminate tension and mistrust. When it happens this way, employees tend to use productive time discussing their plight, showing negative attitudes and emotions, which will cost the organisation the lost time.
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