Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders ─ Enduring Challenges and Emerging Answers

The sinking public trust in contemporary institutions is a multifaceted phenomenon with political, sociological, economic, and psychological antecedents and consequences. Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders is the first volume to adopt the multidisciplinary approach required to understand this decline and to propose and assess remedies.

Editors Roderick M. Kramer and Todd L. Pittinsky have assembled contributions from leading psychologists, sociologists, economists, and organizational theorists. In response to such blows to public confidence as the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, numerous corporate accounting frauds, widespread retirement insecurity, the inadequacy of many school systems, and the failure of politicians in the United States and Europe to come to grips with the economic crisis, Restoring Trust offers a compelling and mind-opening mix of theory, examples, and practical prescription for the critical social problem of restoring public trust in organizations, institutions, and their leaders.

Roderick M. Kramer is one of the world's leading social psychologists and organizational behavior theorists. His research examines the antecedents and outcomes of trust and cooperation in organizations. He has also explored the foundations of decision making, creativity, conflict, and leadership. Kramer is William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and has been a visiting scholar at several other universities, including the University of Oxford, Harvard University, and the London Business School. He has also consulted for various think tanks around the world.

Todd L. Pittinsky is Associate Professor of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University. In 2004, he launched the Allophilia Project to study the nature and application of positive attitudes that individuals have about groups other than their own. Prior to joining the Stony Brook faculty, Pittinsky was Associate Professor and Research Director at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has published widely on the topics of diversity and leadership and is the co-author of Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family (Addison-Wesley, 1997) and the editor of Crossing the Divide: Intergroup Leadership in a World of Difference (Harvard Business Review Press, 2009). His book, Us Plus Them: Tapping the Positive Power of Difference, will be published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2012.