Template - What is Care

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Trust is one of the most studied concepts in the social sciences. It has been examined by psychologists, economists, sociologists, neuroscientists, political scientists, and organizational researchers, each asking a different question and finding a different piece of the answer. The breadth of that inquiry is itself part of the point. Trust is not a soft idea. It is a foundational condition of human cooperation, and the research treating it as such goes back decades.

A Brief History

The Diversity of Fields

Psychology has examined how trust forms between individuals, how it is affected by personality and prior experience, and how it is repaired after violation. Julian Rotter's work in the 1970s on generalized trust as a personality disposition remains foundational.

Important Recent Additions

Psychological Safety. The closest adjacent construct to relational trust in current research is psychological safety, defined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson as the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In a 1999 study of team learning, Edmondson formally defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In practical terms, that means a team climate characterized by trust, respect, and mutual understanding, where people feel comfortable being themselves. Her subsequent research, including Google's Project Aristotle which identified psychological safety as the top predictor of team performance, has made this one of the most practically influential areas of trust-adjacent research in the last two decades. Edmondson's book The Fearless Organization is the most accessible entry point. Psychological safety is centrally tied to learning behavior, while trust lowers transactions costs and reduces the need to monitor behaviour. They are related but distinct, and understanding the difference matters for leaders.

Trust in Remote and Hybrid Work. The shift to distributed work accelerated questions about how trust forms and is maintained without physical proximity. The shift toward remote and hybrid work arrangements presents unique challenges for building psychological safety. Without casual hallway conversations and in-person social cues, leaders must work more intentionally to create connection and invite participation. Dr Richard Chambers The research consensus is that relational trust, built on care and genuine connection, becomes more important, not less, when people work at a distance. Carelessness is also more costly in distributed environments, where small signals of inattention are amplified.

Institutional Trust Decline. Multiple long-running surveys including Edelman's annual Trust Barometer and the World Values Survey have documented sustained declines in trust in institutions across many countries over the past two decades. This decline has downstream effects inside organizations, particularly in mission-driven sectors where staff expect organizational values to be enacted, not merely stated. When institutional trust erodes externally, the pressure on internal relational trust increases.

What the Research Agrees On

Across decades and disciplines, several findings have held consistently. Trust is built through patterns of behaviour, not declarations of intent. It is easier to lose than to build. The components of trustworthiness, ability, integrity, and care, are each necessary but not individually sufficient. Trust has measurable effects on cooperation, performance, and resilience. And the presence or absence of trust shapes how people interpret ambiguous information, which means it affects decision-making in ways that are often invisible until something goes wrong. Trust reduces coordination costs. Chami and Fullenkamp demonstrate this formally: trusting firms spend less effort monitoring each other and more effort on productive work. The efficiency gains are measurable, not assumed.

What the Research Leaves Open

Despite decades of interdisciplinary research on trust, the literature remains fragmented and balkanized with little consensus regarding its origins. NYU Abu Dhabi Trust is notoriously difficult to measure reliably. Most studies rely on self-reported survey data, which captures perception but not always behaviour. Context matters enormously, and findings from one sector or culture do not always transfer cleanly to another. Mission-driven sectors in particular, including not-for-profits, healthcare, education, and government, are understudied relative to corporate environments. That gap is where much of the applied work in this practice sits.

Key Concepts

Trust

Care

Community

Belonging

Template - What is Care

A Brief History

The Diversity of Fields

Important Recent Additions

What the Research Agrees On

Further Reading