The investigation of trust phenomena in labor relations

Trust is a positive expectation that a positive behaviour will be responded to in the same way, or at least not harm from the other party. Trust relations built on positive expectations has many effects and consequences in working life as well as in social life. The effects of trust in working life and its consequences are examined in the context of labor relations. Firstly, the roles of the employee, employer (workplace/organization), unions and state, which are the actors that constitute the working relations and their roles with trust are discussed. Second, a meta-analysis was applied to measure the level of trust of employees to their collaegues, the management, and organizaiton itself. Third and lastly, a qualitative research was conducted to understand the trust phenomenon of employees by using semi-structured interview technique in accordance with the conceptual framework. According to the results obtained by combining 60 theses written about organizational trust and covering the years 2001-2019, using meta analysis method, it was seen that the employees mostly trusted in organization itself, the managers and colleagues, respectively. Within the scope of qualitative research, 24 interviews (20 face-to-face, 4 e-mail) were held and the data obtained were analyzed in the qualitative research program. As a result of the analysis, 9 themes, 44 main codes, 101 sub-codes were obtained and 1553 coding was applied to all codes. The themes created in the qualitative research are the perception of trust, the dimensions of trust, trust relations, factors that create trust, the results of trust, factors that disrupt and create distrust, the breakdown of trust and the consequences of distrust, the process of restoring the broken trust, and the relationship of trust with sociodemographic characteristics. According to the qualitative research results, employess emphasized the factors that create trust and distrust more. This may be due to the fact that trust and distrust are perceived as very active, dynamic, lively and distinctly in social and working life.