This report is made up of a series of short essays and introduces the concept of trust and its importance to military training and general defence capability.
Trust Report Live Panel Debate
Watch the recording of our webinar where our experts discuss our Training and Mission Rehearsal team’s approach to trust in training and how we build those relationships with the customer.
Authors
Christina Balis
Global Campaign Director
Christina Balis is responsible for leading the development and implementation of the company’s strategy and long-term business winning activities in the areas of individual and collective defence training, exercises and mission rehearsal.
Al Whittle (Inzpire)
QinetiQ Fellow
Al joined Inzpire in 2008 following a 32 year career in Army Aviation including tours with the Special Forces as a Lynx Flight Commander and the last 10 years dedicated to Apache Attack helicopter operations where he had tours as the Force Senior Electronic Warfare Officer, Senior Weapons Instructor, Senior Flying Instructor until finally commanding the Apache OCU.
Caren Soper
Caren has over thirty-five years’ experience in military human factors with extensive experience in leading programmes and providing technical input, guidance and consultancy in a wide range of human factors areas. She has worked on a number of collaborative and multi-disciplinary programmes including studies, experiments, trials and demonstrations.
Raph Pascual
Prinicpal Psychologist. Raphael is a psychologist in QinetiQ who has led multiple research programmes with defence, security and commercial clients addressing the analysis and support of expert decision-making, teamwork, and behavioural influence. This research has included the design and application of, alternative planning approaches for Army HQs; teamwork evaluation frameworks for military search and crisis management teams.
Download the executive summaries
Over the last 30 years, scientists have conducted hundreds of studies exploring the role of trust in teams. This huge research effort has led to almost universal consensus about the important role trust plays in team performance.
A main finding from the literature is that trust is one of the critical factors considered to underpin both effective team behaviours and effectiveness outcomes. Other notable conclusions include:
- The greater the interdependence between team members (i.e. the more they have to rely on others to get the job done because they share common goals) the more trust matters.
- Where team members have high autonomy and can complete a task without input from other team members (i.e. they can do the job themselves) then trust matters a lot less.
- When there is a lack of trust in a team (i.e. feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty are high), personal interests are much more likely to be a focus and a priority for individual team members.
- If trust is high, teams are far more likely to share feelings of vulnerability and work through any differences they have – resulting in higher quality outputs.
- Mutual trust within a team is essential for mutual team monitoring and for overall team effectiveness.
Listen to our Trust Series of Podcasts
Ensuring Trust In Teams - Podcast
Our experts discuss trust within teams, the characteristics of a team with high levels of trust, how to build trust effectively and more.
The Triangle Of Trust - Podcast
In this podcast, our Training and Mission Rehearsal (TMR) Global Campaign Director Christina Balis hosts a discussion with Al Whittle, Director of Strategy and Plans on the triangle of trust in terms of the role of industry in defence training and how this has changed over the years.
Trust Overview - Podcast
An overview podcast on the concept of Trust to bring all of our trust series together with our TMR Global Campaign Director, Christina Balis hosting Al Whittle, Director of Strategy and Plans at Inzpire and Helen Dudfield, Chief Scientist, Human Performance on the relationship between trust and team effectiveness and why the concept of trust is so critical in a military context.