Trust and Leadership in Higher Education in the Downturn

This Leadership Academy Workshop presentation focused on 'Trust and Leadership in the Downturn', with particular reference to the public sector and to education. The presentation discussed a range of definitions of trust, including the view of Mayer, Davis and Schoorman (1995) that trust can be described as 'the willingness of a person to be vulnerable to the actions of another, based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that action'. The presentation then focused on the reasons why this relational psychological state is important,particularly in an economic recession when people were facing job cuts and economic uncertainty in a wider political and social environment characterised by cynicism and a downturn in trust. If trust is defined in part as a belief in the honesty, competence and benevolence of others, it tends to act like 'social glue', cushioning difficult situations and enabling actions to take place easily that otherwise would not be permissible. A worrying state of affairs has recently been developing across the world, however, in the economic downturn, as reported in the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2009, in which there was a marked diminuition of trust in corporations, businesses and government, as a result of the credit crunch. While the US and parts of Europe was showing recovery from a generalised loss of trust by mid-year 2009, the UK had not. It seems that social attitudes in Britain may be hardening - it seems that from being a nation of sceptics we may be becoming a nation of cynics: for example, 69% of the population surveyed by Edelman trust the government less than six months ago. In this situation, there is a need to promote positive measures to build trust, including the establishment of more transparent and honest business practices and practices to ensure that employees are treated well. Following the presentation, a workshop was held to discuss the nature of a possible loss of trust in the downturn in the UK and its implications for leadership practices and development.

Social Trust and Demand for Redistribution. Is There a Crowding out Effect?

The debate about the relationship between social capital the welfare state has produced contradictory results for a long time. The crowding out hypothesis states that the growth of the welfare state would erode social capital, as the action of the state leave no room for non-regulated spontaneous cooperation. In sharp contrast, the crowding in hypothesis states that there is virtuous circle between the size of the welfare state and the stock of social capital in a particular country, since generous welfare states (specially those relying on universalistic programs) will produce a particular sense of fairness and solidarity toward fellow citizens. Yet, the empirical evidence testing the explanatory power of these theories is mostly inconclusive. To further our knowledge of this puzzle, in this paper I focus specifically on the relationship between social trust and preferences for redistribution at the individual level in a sample of European countries belonging to different welfare state regimes.

Sanitising or reforming PR? Exploring 'trust' and the emergence of critical public relations

Old 'PR' has a mixed reputation. It has sometimes been regarded as heavy handed and unethical, especially in relation to activists. 'Critical public relations' (CPR) has emerged from academe in recent years as a reformist alternative. This chapter takes a socio-cultural lens to explore CPR and its potential for contribution or compromise within the field.

The role of participative leadership and trust-based mechanisms in eliciting intern performance: evidence from China.

In this article, we investigate the relationship between participative leadership and job performance within the internship setting. Based on two-waves of survey data obtained from 309 intern-supervisor dyads, we find that participative leadership has a positive relationship with job performance, and that affective trust mediates that relationship. We also find that although cognitive trust is not significantly related to intern job performance, it mediates the relationship between participative leadership and affective trust. Our findings contradict those of previous research which question the effectiveness of participative leadership in short-term employment situations such as internships. They also highlight the importance of designing internships to be reflective of typical performance situations, characterized by participative leadership practices, rather than more directive leadership practices.

Exploring issues of trust in collaborative sport governance

This study explores how trust is manifested and impacts on the levels of collaboration that take place in sport governance networks. A case study approach was used as the guiding method to examine the contributingfactors that facilitate or inhibit trusting relationships between boards within sporting networks. Three sports from Australia were employed as the population for the study and 36 in-depth interviews were conductedwith participants from national and state organizations operating within those networks, two federated and one partially unified. Interviews were analyzed using an interpretive process, and a thematic structure relatingto the issues and impact of trust and distrust within the three networks was developed. Extant levels of trust, transparency, the capacity to build trust, and leadership emerged as the key themes in the study. Thedegree to which each of these dimensions was embedded in the cultures and processes of each network varied significantly. Leadership specifically, as a key finding, was shown to be an important factor in fostering collaborative relations at the governance level of these systems. A number of implications for sport governance practice and possible extensions for sport governance research based on these findings conclude the article.

Frontier technologies of trust computing and network security

The increasing complexity of computer systems and communication networks induces tremendous requirements for trust and security. This special issue includes topics on trusted computing, risk and reputation management, network security and survivable computer systems/networks. These issues have evolved into an active and important area of research and development. The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of concurrency and computation systems for practice of highly trust, security and privacy, which has become a key subject in determining future research and development activities in many academic and industrial branches. This special issue aims to present and discuss advances of current research and development in all aspects of trusted computing and network security. In addition, this special issue provides snapshots of contemporary academia work in the field of network trusted computing. We prepared and organized this special issue to record state-of-the-art research, novel development and trends for future insight in this domain. In this special issue, 14 papers have been accepted for publication, which demonstrate novel and original work in this field. A detailed overview of the selected works is given below.

Mitigating malicious feedback attacks in trust management systems

In electronic commerce (e-commerce) environment, trust management has been identified as vital component for establishing and maintaining successful relational exchanges between the trading partners. As trust management systems depend on the feedbacks provided by the trading partners, they are fallible to strategic manipulation of the rating attacks. Therefore, in order to improve the reliability of the trust management systems, an approach that addresses feedback-related vulnerabilities is paramount. This paper proposes an approach for identifying and actioning of falsified feedbacks to make trust management systems robust against rating manipulation attacks. The viability of the proposed approach is studied experimentally and the results of various simulation experiments show that the proposed approach can be highly effective in identifying falsified feedbacks.

Clouds selection for network appliances based on trust credibility

With the development of Cloud services and virtual appliances, more and more clients are willing to use these services to host their applications across different Cloud platforms. However, it becomes harder and harder for clients to select the most trustable Cloud service provider to host their applications. In this paper, we propose a Cloud provider selection model to choose the most reliable platform to deploy network appliances. This selection model is based on the trust credibility to select reliable and cost-effective Cloud providers. A preliminary evaluation is presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed trust model and selection approach.

Improving tenants' trust in SaaS applications using dynamic security monitors

It is almost impossible to prove that a given software system achieves an absolute security level. This becomes more complicated when addressing multi-tenant cloud-based SaaS applications. Developing practical security properties and metrics to monitor, verify, and assess the behavior of such software systems is a feasible alternative to such problem. However, existing efforts focus either on verifying security properties or security metrics but not both. Moreover, they are either hard to adopt, in terms of usability, or require design-time preparation to support monitoring of such security metrics and properties which is not feasible for SaaS applications. In this paper, we introduce, to the best of our knowledge, the first unified monitoring platform that enables SaaS application tenants to specify, at run-time, security metrics and properties without design-time preparation and hence increases tenants’ trust of their cloud-assets security. The platform automatically converts security metrics and properties specifications into security probes and integrates them with the target SaaS application at run-time. Probes-generated measurements are fed into an analysis component that verifies the specified properties and calculates security metrics’ values using aggregation functions. This is then reported to SaaS tenants and cloud platform security engineers. We evaluated our platform expressiveness and usability, soundness, and performance overhead.

Brand trust and avoidance following brand crisis : a quasi-experiment on the effect of franchisor statements

Although franchising has become an important growth strategy in severalindustries over the last few decades, there are few empirical studies about the effects of franchisor communication strategy on customer responses in the context of franchise brand crisis. Two quasi-experimental studies were conducted to test the effect ofa franchisor ownership separation statement on brand trust and brand avoidance following a brand crisis situation. Results show that a franchisor’s explicit communication of the franchise brand’s individual ownership business structure is useful in preventing further negative spillover effect throughout the franchised chain when thebrand crisis occurs at a single franchise location. The authors also investigate the mechanism through which such communication influences customer behavior and the moderating effect of the brand crisis severity in affecting brand evaluation. These results offer guidance to franchise brand managers by providing insight into how to overcome a franchise brand crisis and by suggesting franchise context-specific managerial recommendations

Knowledge management education:five Ws and one H

This panel will discuss key aspects of knowledge management (KM) education in response to challenges posed by the necessity to improve KM as a discipline and an established professional field. Through panelists' thought-provoking presentations and interactions with the audience, the discussion will address KM education from the starting why, what, who, where and when perspectives to the end result and understanding of how to approach KM education in the future.

Travellers’ intention to purchase travel online: integrating trust and risk to the theory of planned behaviour

This study aims to determine which factors influence travellers’ intentions to purchase travel online by proposing and empirically testing a new model grounded on the theory of planned behaviour. In order to validate the model, a web-based questionnaire was applied and a total of 1732 valid responses were obtained. The findings show that attitudes, perceived risk, and perceived behavioural control have significant effects on intentions to purchase travel online. However, contrary to what was expected, neither trust nor the influence of others seems to directly affect intentions to purchase travel online. Finally, the paper discusses the findings with the implicationsfor theory and practice and makes several suggestions for future research.

Travellers’ intention to purchase travel online: integrating trust and risk to the theory of planned behaviour

This study aims to determine which factors influence travellers’ intentions to purchase travel online by proposing and empirically testing a new model grounded on the theory of planned behaviour. In order to validate the model, a web-based questionnaire was applied and a total of 1732 valid responses were obtained. The findings show that attitudes, perceived risk, and perceived behavioural control have significant effects on intentions to purchase travel online. However, contrary to what was expected, neither trust nor the influence of others seems to directly affect intentions to purchase travel online. Finally, the paper discusses the findings with the implications for theory and practice and makes several suggestions for future research.