Building organizational trust in a low‐trust societal context

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to explore the interrelations between organizational trust and ethics management tools as well as ethical organizational practices in a post‐socialist context. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework of the interrelations among organizational trust, ethics management tools and ethical organizational practices is reasoned and the interrelations among the variables are explored using quantitative methods of data analysis. The method of data gathering is a questionnaire survey that was carried out in Lithuania which is taken as an example of a post‐socialist society where trust is rather low. In total, answers from 519 respondents were collected. Findings – The empirical findings confirm the interdependence of the variables. A significant dependence of organizational trust on ethical organizational practices has been established. Research limitations/implications – The research findings imply that ethics management tools just weakly predict emergence of organizational trust in the organizations operating in a post‐socialist context. Rather, organizational practices which integrate ethical principles are considerably more important to building organizational trust. This is a peculiarity of a post‐socialist context where people were used to the relativity of the declared values and ideas, therefore, tend to search for evidence of value realization in practice. However, since post‐socialist societies differ in their socio‐historical past, this claim is not a generalization. Practical implications – The paper provides managerial implications how to advance organizational trust in a post‐socialist context. Originality/value – The research paper provides empirical evidence on the interrelations among organizational trust, ethics management tools and ethical organizational practices, which is scarce in the existing literature on organizational trust. In particular, neither the interrelation between ethics management tools and organizational trust nor a combined effect of ethics management tools and ethical organizational practices on organizational trust has been empirically tested. Thus, the paper fills in this gap in the related literature.