People management rationales and organizational effectiveness : The case of organizational trust repair

–The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate over people management rationales and how they relate to organizational effectiveness.

Drawing on the distinction between the “logic of consequences” and the “logic of appropriateness,” the paper explores one aspect of managing people – managers’ attempts to restore trust after an intra-organizational breach of trust. This is done on the basis of a systematic approach to a review of the literature on intra-organizational trust and organizational trust repair.

The paper argues that in their trust repair efforts managers socially construct and enact a narrow business agenda for the firm, which is typically justified by a logic of consequences. Instead, the authors suggest that managers may be better advised to follow a logic of appropriateness in restoring trust among employees, which acknowledges the importance of context and managers’ lack of control over employees’ reactions to trust repair strategies.

A key practical implication of the logic of appropriateness is that, in certain contexts, the most effective strategy for trust repair is inaction (rather than action), a strategy often neglected in people management practice.

The social implications of this paper highlight the social context in which people management strategies take place and the limitations of “one-size-fits-all” HRM prescriptions.

The value of the paper is bringing a much neglected stream of research on the strengths of inaction as a positive strategy in organizational theory to current HRM scholars as a way of balancing the typical agentive approaches to HRM and intra-organizational trust repair.