Trustworthy business in an unstable world

The FT editor Adam Tooze recently used the term ‘polycrisis’ to denote how the world is facing its most complex and simultaneously unfolding set of challenges in modern history, citing co-occurrence and relationships between climate change, pending nuclear war, anticipated pandemics and global market downturn. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report has used the same term (1) to emphasise that the interaction between these phenomena is likely to have compounding effects.

In a context of polycrisis, being trustworthy is the foundation for any ethics. As part of preparing our students to be the leaders of the future, in my Business Ethics course for the MSc in Marketing Management and the MSc in Marketing Analytics, we explore the intricacies of building and leading trustworthy organisations. 

Here are some of the main ideas we discuss and use to gain insight in how to manage trustworthiness.

Defining the attributions of trustworthiness

To say that trust matters in business is almost a platitude. It is obvious we would want more of it. However, it is far less obvious how to build trust. It implies we need to be trustworthy for others. For a business, being trustworthy implies that its stakeholders believe the business has a specific attribute. 

What are the attributions of trustworthiness? Seminal research by Mayer, Davis and Schoorman (2) puts forward three attributions that can lead us to find a business trustworthy. 

One such attribution is that of ability. It entails a belief that the business has skills and competence, that it is able to produce or achieve something. 

Another attribution of trustworthiness is benevolence. We can find a business trustworthy when we believe it is caring or helping, when we find it has good intentions and a positive orientations towards our well-being.

And finally, we can also attribute trustworthiness to a business when we believe it has integrity. This seems an all-encompassing term, but what is meant here is that you believe the business operates according to a set of principles that you find acceptable. You believe it does things in a certain way. The stated principles and values guide decisions and interactions of this business. It acts the way it speaks. 

These three orientations make up the ABI-model of trustworthiness: Ability, Benevolence, Integrity.

Helping students understand the importance of a unified approach

In our Business Ethics class we take a unique approach. Much of the trust research makes no considered distinction amongst the three types of trustworthiness attributes. Often it is just benevolence that is assumed to be the basis of trust, other times a combination of ability and integrity. For business ethics however, we need to consider all three specific attributions of trustworthiness. These are the antecedents of trust and the reason why trust has an ethical dimension. All three attributions matter – ability, benevolence, integrity – but in a different way and for different stakeholders.

The small group of scholars that does use the ABI-model to design experiments and measure trustworthiness, assumes that all three attributes always matter and that they are  interchangeable. Our unique approach is to question the interchangeability of the three trustworthiness attributes. The implications are that not all three always matter, and that a lack of one attribution cannot simply be compensated by more of another. 

During our sessions, students explore and compare how companies signal their trustworthiness deliberately but often also inadvertently. They search for the ‘crack’ – inconsistencies or other problems in managing the trustworthiness of an organisation – and seek ways to resolve these tensions.

The important point is that it is not trusting that is the matter of ethics, but to be trusted is an ethical matter. How do we reciprocate that attributed trustworthiness? If we cannot deliver on what we promise or what stakeholders expect then we risk greenwashing, social-washing, pilot-washing, and other ways of losing credibility. The human condition makes us hard-wired to trust, but those who are trusted carry the responsibility to deliver. 

Managing an organisation’s trustworthiness therefore also means to make sure we don’t over-promise. Other complexities in managing trustworthiness relate to differences in stakeholder interests, or changing regulation and policy trends. Companies that bluntly revoked their DEI policies or environmental targets in response to whims in the US, may now have to engage in trust repair.

Gaining or losing trust: the responsibility of managers and companies

As part of their coursework, students make a reflective analysis of a specific episode in a previous job or internship that made them gain or lose trust in the organization or a manager. The exercise leads us to understand a crucial concept for managing trustworthiness, namely Robert Hurley’s Organizational Capacity for Trustworthiness (3). This denotes the collective organisational capacity to produce positive signals of trustworthiness and minimise negative signals.

A negative signal does not immediately imply a stakeholder will lose trust in the organisation, but an accumulation of negative signals can all of a sudden tip the bucket and trigger a scandal. Hurley insists that an organisation’s capacity for trustworthiness is a measure of the congruency of routines at different levels of an organization. That is why business ethics is not merely a question of finding the right tone-at-the-top or a compliance structure.

In a context of permacrisis, organisational trustworthiness can be an ethical beacon. Yet, strengthening an organisation’s capacity for trustworthiness requires leadership interventions at different levels of an organisation. Both internal and external stakeholders matter. Educating the leaders of tomorrow involves helping them to learn the intricacies of trustworthiness.

References

(1) We’re on the brink of a ‘polycrisis’ – how worried should we be? (2023) World Economics Forum - https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/01/polycrisis-global-risks-report-cost-of-living/

(2) Mayer, Roger C., et al. “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust.” The Academy of Management Review, vol. 20, no. 3, 1995, pp. 709–34. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/258792. Accessed 9 Dec. 2025. - https://www.jstor.org/stable/258792

(3) Hurley, R. An Organizational Capacity for Trustworthiness: A Dynamic Routines Perspective. J Bus Ethics 188, 589–601 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05318-4 - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-022-05318-4

Photo by Malek Larif via Unsplash