Video: How to Restore Trust When It’s Been Broken

Kellogg Insight takes a look at how we may repair trust once it has been broken, and how to encourage people to avoid trust breaches by acting ethically.

How to Repair Broken Trust

Trust is a lot easier to break than it is to repair. But it turns out that certain types of trust are more difficult than others to rectify. And depending on the type of violation—whether it is the result of incompetence or a lapse in integrity—attempts to apologize can be more or less effective. As part of The Trust Project at Northwestern, Cecily Cooper, an associate professor of management at the University of Miami, discusses research findings related to trust repair.

How to Prevent the Powerful from Abusing their Privilege

Of course, the ideal solution for developing trusting business relationships is for everyone to act ethically. But feelings of power—or powerlessness—can have a significant influence on how people might act when faced with ethical dilemmas. And research from Kellogg School professor Derek Rucker shows how changing the way we frame expectations of people in power might help change their behavior.

“There’s this long-held lay belief that pow­er cor­rupts,” Rucker says. “We’ve been prob­ing and push­ing at that idea in dif­fer­ent ways. We real­ly want to pick it apart and ask: When is that belief true and when is it not true?”

Rucker and his co-authors conducted experiments to study the relationship between power and unethical behavior. In one, they asked some participants how they expect people in power actually behave—and asked others how people in power should behave. Then they asked those same participants how they would act in a hypothetical moral quandary. The results showed that there may be a link between the actions of people who feel powerful and their expectations about how they should behave.

This finding may serve as a start­ing point for curb­ing uneth­i­cal behav­ior in polit­i­cal and cor­po­rate orga­ni­za­tions.

“Peo­ple say pow­er cor­rupts your mind and how you see the world — but it’s not just about hav­ing pow­er. It’s what comes to mind with that power.”