Trust in administration: An integrative approach to optimal trust

Abstract

Although many consider trust as a desirable value in administration, they also find it elusive. The meaning of trust gets more elusive when one seeks to optimize it in administration. The article takes on this quest first by addressing trust as a relational fact, and then, identifying the dynamic conditions of its optimization. Organizational control and organizational learning are discussed as two such conditions-in their embedded as well as enacted forms. Using the contingencies of control and learning, the article delineates a model of optimal trust, where optimality is located in the dynamic interfaces of control and learning that simultaneously maximize the enabling conditions of trust and minimize its disabling conditions. © 2008 Sage Publications.