Abstract:

Communication plays an important role in the development of trust within an organization. The trust between co-workers, supervisors, and top management can influence the perceptions of organizational openness, which in turn influence employees' ratings of their own level of involvement in the organization's goals (Thomas, Zolin & Hartman, 2009). In this paper, Higher Education institutions are viewed as organizations. Despite the volume of literature on trust in other workplace and organizational settings, trust and organizational behavior in the higher education workplace between academics is an under-researched area. Research has tended to focus on trust between teacher and student or teacher-parent trust. van Houlte (2011) researched collegial trust, including the concept of trust being a learning community. While Coleman (1990) explored the university as a social system - exploring interpersonal relations and social capital. Bryk and Schneider (2002) researched mutual understanding in the workplace. To contribute to this field, this paper explores how trust and trusting is constructed among academics working in higher education in Japan.

Trust is defined in a variety of ways, such as a psychological state - something that can be measured. It can be seen as competence-based (Atkinson, 2004), motive-based, role-based, contextual and relational (Atkinson, 2004). This paper views trust as a socially constituted phenomenon and that trusting is always shaped by context. In the same way, an organization is constituted through shared discourse (Brown, 2004) and narrative is important in the creation of human phenomena. The interaction between ‘story’ and ‘discourse’ can be a way to construct experience through stories, while valuing the importance of context. Actors are continually framing the organization and their interactions.

Focusing on non-Japanese academics working in Japanese higher education, this research addressed two research questions:
1) How do individuals construct trust in their day-to-day activities in the workplace (Japanese universities)?
2) How do actors in unfamiliar cultures present themselves as trustworthy?

Based on initial survey data from fifty non-Japanese respondents and face-to-face in-depth interviews, alongside themes derived from the research, narratives were coded and analyzed. As a result, five explanatory devices were revealed and this paper presents the elements of ability, professional benevolence, personal benevolence, integrity and common values in an attempt to start an initial exploration of trust and trusting in the higher education workplace. It is hoped this paper will encourage others to consider the presence of trust and trusting in their institutions.

Keywords:

Trust, higher education, management, organizational behavior, workplace communication.