Managing trust in public organisations: A consolidated approach and its contradictions

Public management reform agendas today are often directed towards the improvement of trust in public organisations. However, the vague concept of trust often leads to contradictory discourse and theory about what needs to be done in order to improve trust. In this paper, we argue that we first need to understand what trust really means in the context of public management before we can assess its value for practice. We present a deductively developed conceptual framework for administrational trust and use it to address contradictions that have contributed to the confounding nature of the trust literature. Based on this discussion, we suggest that a multidimensional and transformative theoretical framework is needed to study and improve trust in public management.