Virtual Library - Summary

Rawlins, B. 2007. Measuring the relationship between organizational transparency and trust. Summary of a paper delivered at the 10th International Public Relations Research Conference, South Miami, USA from 8-11 March 2007.

in 2006, an Institute for Public Relations survey put ‘trust’ right at the top of priority research topics. The public relations literature indicates that ‘transparency’ may be a key driver in producing ‘trust’. According to Richard Edelman in the 2007 Edelman Trust Barometer , “continuous, transparent – and even passionate – communications is central to success” in today’s environment.

This paper reports the findings of a study by Dr. Brad Rawlins of Brigham Young University on the ‘transparency/trust’ linkage. Rawlins developed a survey instrument by defining both ‘trust’ and ‘transparency’ from the academic literature. To measure ‘trust’, he developed questions that measured willingness to trust an organization based on three key components: integrity (is the organization fair and just?); goodwill (does the organization care about me?); and competence (does the organization have the ability to do what it says it will?).

Rawlins’ questions to measure perceptions of organizational transparency stood on four pillars: information provided (is it truthful, substantial and reliable); stakeholder participation (in identifying what sort of information they need and want); accountability (for what the organization does and says, including mistakes); and secretiveness (a “reverse item” measuring the opposite of openness and expected to show a negative correlation to transparency).

To test his methodology, Rawlins surveyed 1 200 employees of a large regional healthcare organization at 150 sites. More than 30% responded. Rawlins found that all three components of trust were valid predictors of employees’ willingness to trust the organization (with integrity and goodwill showing correlations above .80 on a scale where 1.0 represents perfect correlation). Similarly, the four components of transparency could be validated as strongly related to the overall concept with information, participation and accountability being the strongest factors. In the minds of these healthcare employees surveyed, there is thus a provable link between transparency and trust. The survey results showed a correlation of .75, which is strong evidence that a transparent organization is trusted, and vice versa.

“From this study, one could conclude that as organizations become more transparent, they will also become more trusted,” says Rawlins.

The full paper is available on www.instituteforpr.com