Principals are held accountable for student achievement even though they only have an indirect influence on that achievement. Accountability raises the question about what should be the priority for the principal's attention. The literature supports the existence of a positive correlation between faculty trust in the principal and increased student achievement. Our study considered the appropriateness of representing trust as a two-factor model broken down into components related to how teachers view the skill and the will of the principal. Additionally, our study examined which demographic factors of the school and of the principal affect faculty trust in the principal.This study examined historical data acquired from a large suburban school district in the western United States between 2013 and 2014. The archival data included over 1,700 completed surveys from elementary, junior-high, and high-school teachers of the Omnibus T-Scale survey created by Wayne K. Hoy and Megan Tschannen-Moran (2003).Almost all principals in the study were evaluated higher in terms of skill (competence, reliability, honesty) than in terms of will (benevolence, openness, empathy of vulnerability), and the data set fits a two-factor model of trust. Our findings show no significant association between the principal or school demographics and overall faculty trust in the principal, with the exception of a negative correlation between the principal's level of education and faculty trust in the principal. These findings suggest principals are not at a disadvantage to achieve faculty trust based on principal and school demographic factors.

This thesis comprises three main sections: a literature review, research report, and a critical appraisal of the research process. The literature reviewed is the existing research relating to trust as a construct. An attempt is made to clarify the conceptual confusion that exists in the area, by suggesting a comprehensive definition of what is meant by the term trust for the purposes of both the current study and future research. The importance of trust in relation to mental health and therapeutic relationships is discussed. Current measures of the construct are critically examined, and the ‘scientist’ versus ‘humanist’ divide is explored. It is concluded that a new multidimensional trust measure is required to further research efforts in the area. The aim of the research project was to develop a trust measure to form a part of a larger endeavour to operationalise the concept of mental health via key set of basic human emotions and responses. The research reported in Section 2 consists of a Pilot Test, Main Study, and follow up validation study of a new multidimensional measure of trust. Three bases of trust were hypothesised and tested. These were: self trust, interpersonal trust, and environmental trust (that is, trust in wider social, cultural, or political context). A new measure was constructed and validity tested using an inductive approach, and the relationship between trust and trait anxiety was also examined. The results supported the hypothesis that trust is a multidimensional construct, and demonstrated a strong relationship between trust and trait anxiety. It is hoped that this work will rekindle research interest in this important area. The final section is the researcher’s critical appraisal of the research process based on her personal research diary. It is a reflective piece that examines the impact of the research on the researcher (and vice versa) and the critical events in the research process.

A deficient safety culture has been implicated in a number of organisational accidents from a range of high hazard industries. Despite its implications for safety, many questions about safety culture remain unanswered. In order to contribute to the literature on this topic, this thesis set out to investigate the role of trust in safety culture. The oil and gas industry was chosen as the context for study due to the hazardous nature of its work, the industry’s focus on continuous improvement in safety performance and the interest shown by oil companies in participating in safety research. Leading models of safety culture have stressed the importance of trust in developing and maintaining patterns of safe behaviours at work. This thesis proposed a new model of safety culture based on dual attitudes about trust. This model states that explicit attitudes about trust are part of safety climate and that implicit attitudes about trust comprise some of the basic underlying assumptions that are the deepest level of safety culture. In order to test this model, this thesis developed a method to measure implicit attitudes about trust in an industrial setting. Using this method, two studies of dual attitudes about trust were conducted at different UK gas plants. In both of these studies, different patterns of results were found for measures of explicit and implicit attitudes about trust for workmates, supervisors and the plant leadership, respectively. These findings support the proposed model suggest that explicit and implicit attitudes about trust are separate constructs that may influence different types of safety behaviours.  Positive relationships were found between measures of explicit attitudes about trust and self-report items about safety behaviours like reporting incidents and challenging unsafe acts.  These findings were taken as a step toward validating the proposed model.

Successful educational systems are established, maintained, and cultivated on a foundation of trust. Effective communication among colleagues is widely accepted as a characteristic of groups who establish and maintain high levels of trust. Despite the importance of the relationships between interpersonal communication skills and levels of organizational trust in postsecondary educational settings, there is very little published on this topic. Further, no published research was located that examined relationships between measures of mindfulness in communication with levels of organizational trust in postsecondary educational settings. This study examined relationships between measures of competent and mindful communication with levels of organizational trust among coworkers, with supervisors, and with the organization in a postsecondary academic library. Study participants included 116 out of 150 non-student library employees of a postsecondary academic library on a large suburban private university campus. The research survey was comprised of four different instruments: the SocioCommunicative Orientation Scale (SCO; Richmond & McCroskey, 1990); the Cognitive Flexibility Scale (CFS; Martin & Rubin, 1995); the Mindfulness in Communication Scale (MCS; Arendt et al., 2019); and the Workplace Trust Survey (WTS; Ferres & Travaglione, 2003). The functioning of each instrument was examined by confirmatory factor analysis. Satisfactory model fit for each instrument was obtained. Structural equation modeling revealed that self-reported levels of communication responsiveness predicted levels of trust in coworkers (p = .02). Perceived levels of mindfulness in communication of coworkers predicted levels of trust in coworkers (p < .001), and perceived levels of mindfulness in communication of supervisors (p < .001) predicted levels of trust in supervisors. This research suggests that perceptions of mindfulness in communication among coworkers and with supervisors are associated with levels of organizational trust within postsecondary academic settings in important ways. Further research is necessary to increase understanding of the relationships between mindfulness in communication and organizational trust in educational environments.