Most firms feel the squeeze from two directions: social trust is fraying while employees are disengaging. Seven in ten people worldwide now take an insular stance, reluctant to trust those who do not share their values or facts, and only a third believe the next generation will be better off (Edelman Trust Institute, 2026). Inside companies the mood is no better. Global engagement has dropped to 20 percent, a level Gallup estimates costs about 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, or 9 percent of global GDP (Gallup, 2025). The reflex in such times is to tighten control. The evidence points the other way. Employers are unusually well placed to act as trust brokers, and the gains from doing so are structural, not sentimental (Edelman Trust Institute, 2026).
Employers are now the trust brokers
Edelman finds that employers have the smallest gap between what people expect and what they deliver, and that employees grant their employer more trust than they give to many other institutions (Edelman Trust Institute, 2026). The report highlights a practical lever: companies can scale trust brokering through conflict-resolution training and structured interaction among people with different values. This is not about corporate kumbaya. It is an operating capacity. When teams can disagree productively across lines of belief and background, decisions speed up and reputational risk falls. In a climate where 70 percent of people hesitate to trust unlike others, organizations that can reliably host such exchanges hold a scarce capability (Edelman Trust Institute, 2026).
What trust by default looks like in structure
The most developed body of work on decentralizing authority comes from research on self-managing organizations. Lee and Edmondson define these as firms that systematically push decision rights out to the edges and eliminate the manager–subordinate relationship as the default organizing principle (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). Their synthesis is clear on scope and limits. Traditional managerial hierarchy is well suited to reliable execution of known tasks in stable environments. It tends, however, to inhibit complex, nonroutine problem solving that cuts across functions, to harden into rigidity, and to amplify status differences that stunt people’s development (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). That is a design trade-off, not an ideology.
Trust as default does not require adopting a radical model wholesale. It does require making decentralization the starting presumption where work is uncertain and interdependent. In practice that means codifying roles rather than ranks, clarifying decision rights and accountabilities, and increasing transparency so that authority can move to where information lives. These are design choices that lower the cost of coordination without leaning on positional power. The point is not the absence of structure. It is the presence of the right structure for the kind of problems the firm must solve. The research is a theory-driven synthesis, not a randomized trial, so leaders should test and adapt rather than copy-and-paste. The guidance is still useful: match organizing form to task uncertainty and interdependence (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
The local mechanism: psychological safety
If trust is the policy, psychological safety is the team-level mechanism. Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999). In a field study of 51 work teams within a manufacturing company, she found that psychological safety was associated with learning behaviors such as asking for help and speaking up, while team efficacy was not, once safety was accounted for. Learning behavior mediated the link between psychological safety and performance. In plain terms, teams that feel safe to surface problems tend to learn more, and that learning relates to better outcomes (Edmondson, 1999). The study is cross-sectional and based on one company, so causality cannot be asserted. Even so, it shows how a trust-default design needs to land: in everyday interactions where people can take small risks without social penalty.
For executives, the implication is concrete. Measure psychological safety at the team level, then treat it as a leading indicator for adaptability. Managers cannot manufacture trust by memo, but they can remove penalties for candor and create norms for asking questions. If decentralization sets the stage, psychological safety is what keeps the play from stalling when the script runs out.
The cost of distrust, and the design gap
The price of getting this wrong is visible in Gallup’s survey data. Engagement sliding to 20 percent is not a rounding error. Gallup puts the global productivity loss at roughly 10 trillion dollars, or 9 percent of worldwide GDP (Gallup, 2025). Manager engagement has also fallen, down nine points since 2022, including a drop from 27 to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025 (Gallup, 2025). That is a warning light for any model that asks managers to be the bottleneck for every decision. The same report points to a wide performance frontier. In best-practice organizations, 79 percent of managers are engaged, which is almost four times the global average of 22 percent (Gallup, 2025). That spread is hard to explain by mood or macroeconomics. It suggests design. Where decision rights, clarity, and local trust are stronger, managers are less trapped in low-value control work and more engaged in leading actual outcomes.
Start with what you can scale
Leaders do not need faith to move. They need mechanisms they can deploy at scale.
- Act on your “trust broker” role. Fund conflict-resolution training and deliberate interactions among people with different values or backgrounds. Edelman’s finding highlights these as levers employers can use to build bridging trust inside the firm’s walls (Edelman Trust Institute, 2026).
- Publish a decision-rights map for a critical value stream. Name the few decisions that must escalate and push the rest to the edge. Then compare cycle times and error rates before and after. This applies the decentralization logic that research links to adaptability in complex work, while acknowledging that stable, routine tasks still benefit from classical hierarchy (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
- Measure and manage psychological safety at the team level. Use it to prioritize leadership attention where learning behavior is likely to stall. This operationalizes the link Edmondson observed between safety, learning, and performance in her field study (Edmondson, 1999).
Trust as the default is not a slogan. It is a choice about who gets to decide, how disagreements are handled, and what risks people can take together. In a world where public trust is brittle and disengagement is expensive, employers that build for trust have the advantage. The returns will show up in retention, in cycle time, and in the number of problems your teams can solve without waiting for permission.
Sources
- Edelman Trust Institute (2026). Edelman Trust Barometer 2026. Shows a 70% global insular mindset and positions employers as the most credible trust brokers, recommending conflict training and cross-value interaction as scalable levers. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs and synthesizes evidence that hierarchy suits routine stability while decentralization aids complex, cross-functional problem solving, with clear limits and trade-offs. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Introduces team psychological safety and finds it is associated with learning behaviors that mediate its link to performance in a field study of 51 teams. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports global engagement at 20%, an estimated $10 trillion productivity cost (9% of global GDP), a nine-point drop in manager engagement since 2022, and a 79% manager engagement rate in best-practice firms. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx