There has never been a more important time to have an engaged workforce than now. This may be because it plays a vital role towards an organisation's success and competitive advantage. Employee engagement affects the mind-set of people and this causes them to believe that they can make a difference in their organizations. In fact, research continues to reveal a strong link between engaged employees and employee performance. Thus, employee engagement has become so important to employers that different strategies continue to be put in place to achieve their objective of effectively ensuring employee engagement. Unfortunately, many of these strategies have not worked. Some scholars believe that the failure or limited success of strategies to enhance employee engagement can be attributed to the lack of trust that some employees may have towards organisational leaders. Consequently, they argue that the first step that must be undertaken in building an effective employee engagement is building trust, which will erode all sorts of suspicion of the intention of leaders in the organisation. In short, such scholars believe that trust is a crucial precursor to positive employee engagement. Thus, without an environment of trust, all efforts that may go into building effective employee engagement and enhancing employee performance may fall short.
In spite of this, the literature is not clear about how to build such trust, especially in developing countries where the organisational environment is much different from that in developed ones. In a nutshell, while some scholars have studied how such a trust can be built at the workplace, the majority of these studies have focused on the developed world at the neglect of developing countries. This is unfortunate since, in the developed world, formality permeates the organizational environment, while in developing countries, 'informality' is more the norm, thus making the applicability of such models in these countries quite difficulty and a bit unhealthy. In view of this, the question the paper intends to answer is, how can public sector leaders build trust in the organisations in an environment where informality appears to be the norm?
Following the Great Place to Work Institute’s Trust Model, especially, the trust part of the model, and using Ghana as the case study, we argue that leaders in organisations in developing countries must be credible, show respect based on both formal and informal norms, and display fairness to build trust between themselves and their subordinates. Such an approach will affect the level of employee engagement and enhance the performance of employees.
The paper uses the mixed methods approach in the collection of data. The data was collected through the administration of questionnaire and focus group interview of employees in three Civil Service organisations, which were purposively selected.
I4 - Trust-based Management in Public Sector. In Public Managers We Trust?
