How is organizational trust preserved during times of disruption? We address this question, building on the concept of active trust which views trust as an ongoing accomplishment constituted by reflexive actors. Drawing on a multi-case study of four organizations that experienced major disruption in response to the global financial crisis of 2009, we contribute to trust theory in three ways. First, we extend beyond the current focus on trust building and repair by developing conceptual understanding of trust preservation as a distinct phenomenon. Second, we develop a theoretical model that explains how organizational actors accomplish the preservation of employees’ trust in their organization. We identify three trust preservation practices used in the successful case organizations – cognitive bridging, emotional embodying and inclusive enacting – and show that organizational members’ understanding of the established foundations of trust in the organization, and their ability to mobilize these, are critical to the preservation of trust. Third, we position trust preservation as a manifestation and extension of active trust, and show that for trust to be preserved in disruptive contexts, both familiarization and transformation of existing trust practices are required.

No abstract

The relationship between professionals and clients has received considerable interest, more recently through the concept of client capture. However, little is known to date about the mechanisms through which professionals become captured by their clients. Drawing on 50 interviews investigating the promotion of lawyers to partnership in seven UK law firms, we contribute to existing understanding by exploring the creation of client capture during professional career progression. We propose that by bestowing clients with influence over who gets promoted to partnership, lawyers lose professional independence in defining the future of their firm. In addition, we illustrate how lawyers make themselves indirectly dependent on their clients by perceiving partnership as influential to client work. By doing so, they rely on their clients to legitimize partnership as the ideal career path. Based on our findings, we argue that career progression acts as an enabling mechanism for the creation of client capture as, by succumbing to the desire to advance their careers, professionals also become prone to client capture. We discuss the implications of our findings for professional–client relations and client capture, professional careers and the changing nature of professional work.

How do organizational decision-makers and promotion candidates experience promotions in elite professional careers? Despite literature recognizing that promotions are important career events for organizations and individuals, this question has received little scholarly attention.Drawing on a narrative approach and combining spoken and visual accounts, this article examines how organizational decision-makers and promotion candidates experience the promotion to partnership in law firms. Our study reveals four narratives which illustrate important differences and similarities in their accounts. In the official script, organizational decision-makers uniformly recounted promotions in a detached way, emphasizing objective meanings of career success. In contrast, promotion candidates' accounts were varied ranging from joy and anticipation in walk in the park, to anger and frustration in dark art to anxiety and ambivalence in bittersweet narratives. The study makes three contributions to the literature on promotions. First, we develop an emotion-based understanding of promotions suggesting that promotions are constructed through people's lived emotional experiences which inform their meaning making of the new role. Second, we argue that promotions are not always positive career events, but potentially contradictory and negative. Third, we contribute to extant research on promotions which has favoured quantitative methodologies by adopting a multimodal approach.

No abstract