Building Trust

There are several references to trust in Wikipatterns, a book that I enjoyed reading recently and about which I posted some comments this blog. While I believe the claims wikis and trust are true, there is little if any research to support them. The importance is that social media – see my hypothesis – are worth investing in because they improve the organizational climate as well as share knowledge and add to social capital. Improved organizational climate fosters better productivity. There is plenty of evidence to support that claim.

These are the main references to trust that I found:

Geoffrey Corb at Johns Hopkins: “We have found that people involved in our projects are more well informed than ever before. Trust has strengthened between project participants and stakeholders since our operations are more transparent than ever before.”(Mader, 2008, p. 39)

“Wikis shift the social balance away from control and closer to trust.”(p. 49)

“Closed systems implicitly assume that people can’t be trusted and technology has to be relied on to control access to information. This encourages an organizational culture where people don’t trust each other and are concerned with maintaining control over information access. . . .

“Fundamentally open tools such as the wiki encourage just the opposite. Their design assumes that people can be trusted with the information they have access to, and will use it responsibly to further shared goals. This encourages a culture where people do trust each other, and involve others in their work to build the best possible end product in less time and with less unnecessary back and forth effort. . . .”(pp. 50-51)

“A wiki thrives on active participation by as many people as possible, and in turn brings greater value to each individual user. It relied on transparency, trust, and willingness to share information more openly, work more collaboratively, and see information as more valuable when more people have access to it.”(p. 121)

I believe the benefits claimed for wikis and my research needs a few (anonymous) firms where I may add some social media use questions to employee surveys to test my hypothesis on the subject of trust.

Reference

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.