Leadership Research Summary:
• Organizational mergers and subsequent restructurings often create situations in which employees are assigned a new supervisor and they start to form a new relationship. In this study, researchers investigated how the development of trust in a new supervisor is affected by trust cues specific to the merger context. The study conducted a quasi-experiment using three-wave longitudinal data to follow the development of trust throughout two years.
• About half of the participants were assigned a new supervisor between pre-merger (Time 1) and first post-merger (Time 2) measurement time points, while the remaining participants continued to work with the same supervisor.
• Results showed that new supervisor’s outgroup membership prior to the merger was negatively related, while favorable outgroup attitudes and perceptions of top management reliability were positively related to the development of trust. These cues were important especially in the early phase of the relationship, but their relative importance decreased over time
Leadership Research Findings:
- The study’s results suggest that our intergroup variables (supervisor pre-merger group membership and outgroup attitudes) were related to trust development, and importantly, that these associations decreased over time. Nominating outgroup leaders simply cannot be avoided during changes if leadership positions are to be filled based on qualifications instead of group memberships.
- As such, the slowly reducing impact of pre-existing group categories can be considered as good news, pointing to the evolution and malleability of group membership. However, when appointing new supervisors, upper-level management should be aware of these issues and prepare new supervisors that they may not be immediately accepted by outgroup subordinates, and that earning trust may require extra effort.
- In addition, supervisors should be aware that their subordinates may initially lean on trust cues that are partially outside of a supervisors’ direct control. Given that ingroup members view outgroup members with suspicion, and tend to forgive transgressions by ingroup members (e.g., Abrams et al., 2013; Horwitz & Rabbie, 1989), supervisors who used to belong to “one of them” (the partner organization) should be especially sensitive to issues of group membership at early stages.
- Since biases are often activated without one’s awareness or intentional control (Greenwald & Krieger, 2006), supervisors should be sensitive to not giving impression that they are favoring their own ingroup in decision-making, allocation of resources, and the adoption of practices from their own premerger organizations.
- Similarly, it is likely to be important to avoid feeding employees potentially negative attitudes towards the employees of the merger partner (e.g., information suggesting ingroup superiority, outgroup inferiority, or a combination of these two) as this may hinder the development of trust with new supervisors. We are aware that this would be rather challenging especially in context where large layoffs are expected and when employees may be very sensitive to issues of how layoffs are targeted between merger partners.
- Nevertheless, during a merger, outgroup attitudes can be developed in a more favorable direction by promoting the sense of common ingroup identity (Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, & Rust, 1993) within the newly formed organization by adopting fair change management procedures (e.g., Lipponen et al., 2017). Cultivating top management reliability as a continuous practice well before dramatic restructurings may not only improve organization’s general readiness to change but also make it easier to build new trusting relationships at a later date.