Trust Governance:How do global companies govern and manage trust?Early insights from ongoing study

Trust Governance: How do global companies govern and manage trust? Early insights from the ongoing study
Presentation by Dr Adela Drozdibob

Abstract – Trust has been studied in various disciplines, including management, behavioural studies, information systems, and many more. Trust has also been an important factor impacting the way organisations are formed and the way they interact with other organisations and customers. The evident importance of trust attached attention from both, academics, and practitioners, which resulted in multiple trust understanding (definitions), frameworks, dimensions, and measures produced in both groups.
Until a few years ago, all organisations’ comprehended trust is important and shared responsibility for trust building among all employees. Trust was everyone's responsibility, but no one was accountable for it. This has created an obstacle to develop a comprehensive understanding of trust, since none of the existing roles has been aware of all other roles in charge of trust. Only recently five global companies decided to centralise this and started appointing one person to be in charge of trust, a Chief Trust Officer (CTO) or Trust Director (TD). Amazon, SAP, Salesforce, Airbnb and Yahoo have board member appointed to govern trust and we would like to understand that does this role entail for, has this appointment helped them understand trust better and how this is affecting their business strategies and operations. In this study, we interview these trust governors and aim to produce trust governance definition and clarification on practices applied to govern trust.

About Dr Adela Drozdibob:
Dr Drozdibob is an expert in operations management with significant industry experience in the area of engineering, production management, and sustainability. Having education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Monash University, her research focuses on resilience building in the context of natural disasters and the role of trust. She particularly observes how trust can be utilised to build resilience and also how is trust governed and embedded in the strategy and management. The purpose of observing trust in this manner is to understand its role in the overall strategic development of the organisation, but also its support to resilience building in the crisis.
Dr Drozdibob especially adopts an inductive and interactive approach, purposefully interacting with other academics and industry to ensure the practical application of the research findings.