Our purpose was to find out to what extent civil servants—managers, specialists, and experts—in 13 Finnish ministries have confidence in their management systems. We defined trust as a kind of deep sentiment, more fundamental than mere acceptance, satisfaction or legitimacy. Trust and mistrust are strong motivators for cooperation and collaboration. They are logical outcomes of social interaction in terms of management systems and context. We found out that civil servants are more likely to trust management if it acts professionally with no emphasis on political factors. Ministers, for instance, can efficiently earn their trust with administrative experience and behavior norms. Our analysis showed that there are both well‐trusted and ill‐trusted components in management systems implicating that management must be the object of continuous development. As a whole civil servants have more confidence in work community than in strategy, structure, people policies, and administrative processes of the ministries. Keywords: TrustManagementCentral governmentCivil servants Notes aRespondents were asked to assess both the importance and utilization of the claims which are depicted as averages. If the difference between them is positive (the average of the former is higher than that of the latter), there is room for further development of the component. If the average is negative, the component is well utilized in relation to its importance. bThe first column only in Appendix 2 ranks agencies from the most trusted to the least trusted.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Harisalo et al. (2003) studied this question.