How Shared Responsibility Builds Employee Trust (Even When Structural Reforms Can't)
Newly published research shows that even highly regulated organizations can strengthen employee trust--all while preserving a sense of accountability, too
ESBJERG, Denmark — According to newly published academic research analyzing the outcome of trust reforms in different regulatory contexts1, even organizations with high constraints around institutional structures are able to increase trust with their frontline employees—provided they focus on building “interactive trust.”
Examples of how they can do this successfully, with my emphasis in bold:
One approach involved retranslating existing regulations—clarifying the intent behind control mechanisms and making performance metrics more transparent and meaningful. This was perceived as a gesture of trust, as it involved inclusion and shared responsibility: ‘Today, we know exactly what the measures are and where we are in terms of progress. I think it’s a kind of trust that they involve us’ (Employee).
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Another important initiative was the introduction of a four-day workweek, enabled by a loophole in working time regulations. This represented a release of new trust-promoting structures, offering greater flexibility and reinforcing employee autonomy: ‘You decide when you work … I trust you to solve your tasks with the citizens’. (Leader)
I love academic papers and research focused on the impact of practical trust strategies, so I was ready to dive in and learn more.
Case Study: Municipal Trust Reforms in Denmark
As it turns out, the Municipality of Esbjerg, Denmark, has integrated trust as a core value in its strategy, vision, leadership programs and HR policies. Its leaders have undergone trust-based leadership training, and it has embarked on a series of “trust reforms,” across various areas and levels of the municipality.
For their research, the authors compared the impact of various operational and interactional trust reforms among employees in the less-regulated elder care sector to those in the heavily regulated employment administration.
Their analysis revealed four approaches to strengthening structural trust (reducing, redesigning, retranslating, institutional structures, or releasing new ones) that were effective in the less-regulated elder care sector, but less available to the employment sector, where regulation imposed greater restrictions.
4 Ways to Create a Sense of Shared Responsibility
However, both organizations also invested in substantial interactive trust-building reforms. Here are the four steps that successfully built interactive employee trust—even where structural trust issues had to be left unaddressed:
Employee autonomy and trust-based working, with specific training and competence development as a foundation
Efforts to promote value alignment, using either bottom-up dialogue and everyday co-reflection, or formal leadership networks and training to promote shared understanding
An emphasis on supportive leadership, with specific leadership training on how to create a psychologically safe work environment
Encourage and legitimize experimentation as a pathway to learning and professional growth, including behaviors such as:
Leaders normalized mistakes as part of learning, fostering a non-punitive environment
Leaders openly acknowledged their own errors
In spite of the greater constraints on structural trust reforms, employees of both organization reported positively to the trust reform, with both saying they felt a notable improvement in the sense of perceived trust from their leaders. The key link between all of the interventions: they were designed to increase a sense of shared responsibility, which ultimately cultivated a higher sense of trust.
The Outcome: More Trust, Shared Accountability
One of the valuable insights in this paper come in the discussion section, when the authors focus on the impact of trust-building on accountability:
Our findings suggest that accountability is not being eliminated but reshaped and reinterpreted as shared responsibility based on trust and mutual expectations rather than top-down control.
They conclude that where relationships are trust-based, rather than hierarchical, mutual vulnerability form the basis of governance, turning top-down accountability into shared responsibility, which increases both the legitimacy and flexibility of the system as a whole.
While there are always more questions to be answered, the research team establishes that trust interventions focused on training, leadership skills, and culture can be effective in cultivating a sense of shared responsibility, and thereby increase a sense of trust.
And the good leaders of the Municipality of Esbjerg, Denmark have confirmed that high-trust societies are not a coincidence, but that building and maintaining trust requires constant vigilance, investment, and reform.
Bentzen, T. Ø., Winsvold, M., & Six, F. (2026). Beyond the birdcage: building trust in different regulatory contexts. Public Management Review, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2026.2623188