Why managers are central to workplace trust

Article Summary

• Why line managers are central to how employees experience trust at work
• How inconsistent management behaviour can weaken openness, accountability and performance
• What leaders and HR teams can do to make trust a daily management discipline

Trust in an organisation may be set by senior leaders, shaped by culture and reinforced through policy but for most employees it becomes real in the relationship with their line manager.

Imagine an employee sitting in a team meeting as a new decision is announced. The organisation has been talking a lot about openness. Leaders have said they want challenge, honesty and fresh thinking. But the employee has also learnt, over time, that their manager does not respond well to awkward questions. So they stay quiet. Later, they raise the concern privately with a colleague or they say nothing at all and quietly adjust their own work to reduce the risk.

In that moment psychological safety is low. The employee does not believe it is safe to take the interpersonal risk of challenging the decision in the room. This may also influence their trust in the manager over time, particularly if the pattern is repeated.

Why managers matter so much to workplace trust

This is why managers can become a significant trust risk in any organisation. They are the place where leadership intent is tested. A value only becomes meaningful when it survives contact with everyday management behaviour while a commitment to psychological safety only matters if the person running the meeting can hear challenge without becoming defensive.

There is an important distinction here. Psychological safety is often experienced in the group: can I question, disagree or admit a mistake here? Trust is more relational: am I willing to make myself vulnerable to this manager or colleague because I believe they will respond well? The two interact, but they are not interchangeable.

Research from Mitterer and Mitterer, published in the Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, notes that employees can research an organisation before joining but they cannot fully assess the true behaviours of the manager they will work for until they are inside the relationship. Over time these interactions shape whether people feel valued and supported or less important than the work being demanded of them.

Investors in People’s The Trust Paradox research shows how local this experience of trust can be. One in five employees say trust in their organisation depends heavily on who their manager happens to be. The same proportion has felt reticent about speaking up about concerns over manager behaviour.

At the Make Work Better Conference Investors in People CEO Katherine Chapman used this finding to make a wider point about lived trust. Supporting people is where managers and the way work is organised become particularly important. If trust depends heavily on who your manager is employees can have very different experiences of the same organisation.

In our previous whitepaper, The Broken Ladder, we found that 93% of employees said management was important to their overall job satisfaction. Our new research adds a sharper trust lens to this finding. It shows that managers are not simply important to how people feel about work; they strongly influence the conditions in which people decide what they are willing to say, challenge or disclose.

Megan Reitz, associate fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, puts this clearly:

“When asking people to reflect on psychologically safe cultures, their frame of reference is often their manager. The manager relationship is therefore incredibly important in developing trust within the organisation.”

That is why the local nature of trust should worry leaders. If trust depends heavily on the manager someone has then the organisation does not yet have a consistent trust culture. It has uneven pockets of trust, shaped by the habits, confidence and emotional discipline of individual managers.

The hidden cost of management silence to trust

Many trust problems begin with a conversation that does not happen. For example, a manager notices that someone’s work is slipping. At first they give the benefit of the doubt. Then they wait for a better moment. They soften the message because they do not want to knock the person’s confidence or because the team is already under pressure. Weeks pass. The issue then becomes harder to raise because it has been left too long, and by the time the conversation finally happens it carries far more weight than it needed to.

The employee, meanwhile, may sense that something is wrong. Perhaps the manager is more distant or work is being redirected without explanation. In the absence of clarity people start to fill the silence themselves. This is also why the manager relationship matters so much when something goes wrong. The Trust Paradox finds that more than a third of employees would speak to their manager first in that situation. This is a positive signal, suggesting many employees still see their manager as the person who can help them make sense of a problem, find a way through it and avoid unnecessary escalation.

But it is also fragile. A quarter of employees said they would try to fix a problem or mistake quietly before telling anyone. This may be a sign that trust in the manager is fragile. Two employees may be facing the same issue with one feeling able to take it to their manager and another deciding it is safer to handle it alone.

Why avoiding difficult conversations damages trust

McKinsey’s work on courageous conversations describes the damage caused by “withholds”: the unaired truths, resentments and broken agreements that accumulate when people do not say what needs to be said. In a team these withholds rarely stay private. They show up in guarded collaboration, slower decisions and a reluctance to put difficult issues on the table.

This is the performance courage gap. Employees often want clearer direction and more useful feedback than managers feel confident giving. Managers, in turn, may fear that honesty will damage trust when the greater risk is usually avoidance. Trust can be strengthened when managers raise difficult issues with fairness, respect and a genuine intention to help the person succeed.

This is where the We invest in people framework is particularly relevant. The Leading principle highlights the importance of developing leadership capability, including line managers knowing what is expected of them and people knowing what to expect from their line manager. The Managing performance principle emphasises open and honest conversations, constructive dialogue, regular feedback and performance evidence being used to improve both people and the organisation.

These are practical management disciplines. They make expectations visible, reduce uncertainty and can lessen the perceived need for employees to protect themselves. And they help managers turn accountability into a shared conversation about improvement.

Inconsistent management creates uneven trust

Inconsistent management creates uneven trust across the organisation. One team may feel empowered and informed, while another feels cautious and exposed. Senior leaders may believe they have created a high-trust culture because the organisational message is clear, while employees experience a patchwork of different realities.

This is where the hierarchy gap becomes important. Edelman’s Trust at Work research finds that executives are far more likely than entry-level associates to trust the CEO to tell the truth about what is happening inside the organisation. The further away employees are from senior decision-making the more they rely on their direct manager to interpret what is happening and what it means for them.

Managers are the people who have to make senior decisions understandable to their teams. They can explain what is known, be honest about what remains uncertain and listen to concerns without becoming defensive. They can also close the loop, which is one of the simplest and most overlooked trust-building behaviours.

What leaders and HR teams can do

The starting point is to stop treating manager capability as a generic development issue. How managers behave is a core part of how employees experience trust.

HR and senior leaders therefore need to look closely at the moments where trust is most likely to be built or damaged. How do managers handle bad news? What happens when an employee challenges a decision? Are performance concerns raised early, while they are still useful, or left until they become formal and loaded? Do managers have the confidence to explain uncertainty without filling the gaps with false reassurance? The answer is unlikely to come from another leadership model alone. Managers need practical routines that make honesty normal.

Leaders also need to ask whether the role itself is realistic. It is hard for managers to build trust if they are overloaded, unclear about their authority or left to translate difficult organisational messages without support. A stretched manager may default to control, avoid ambiguity or pass pressure down the line without meaning to. Manager behaviour matters but so do the conditions around it.

Manager trust checklist: are your managers building or weakening trust?

Use this diagnostic to assess whether management behaviour is supporting trust in practice.

• Clarity: Do managers explain priorities, decisions and expectations in language people can act on?
• Consistency: Do employees know what to expect from their manager, especially under pressure?
• Openness: Do managers invite questions and concerns early, before issues escalate?
• Fairness: Are performance, workload and development decisions handled transparently?
• Feedback: Do managers give regular, useful feedback rather than saving it for formal review points?
• Mistakes: Do managers respond to errors in ways that support learning and accountability?
• Dissent: Are employees actively invited to challenge assumptions before decisions are made?
• Support: Are managers given enough time, training and senior backing to lead well?
• Evidence: Are trust in managers and psychological safety within teams assessed separately rather than being absorbed into one broad culture score?

For most employees managers are where organisational trust is tested day to day. Their behaviour can reinforce the culture leaders want to build or quietly undermine it through inconsistency, pressure and poor communication. For organisations the priority is to stop treating management capability as a middle-layer issue and start seeing it as core trust infrastructure. When managers are clear, fair, well-supported and able to hold honest conversations trust becomes something employees experience in the flow of work.

Related conference session: Watch Veronica Hope Hailey explore how organisations can rebuild confidence in leadership and HR at Make Work Better 2026.

Sources

1. 1.Mitterer, Dennis M., and Heather E. Mitterer. 2023. “The Mediating Effect of Trust on Psychological Safety and Job Satisfaction.” Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management 23 (1): 29–41. https://doi.org/10.21818/001c.73642
2. 2.The Broken Ladder, Investors in People. https://www.investorsinpeople.com/insights/research/the-broken-ladder/
3. 3.McKinsey, Courageous conversations: How to lead with heart. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/courageous-conversations-how-to-lead-with-heart