Working Paper III: Exploring Administrational trust in Flanders: Prevalence of administrational 'trust problems' in the Flemish administration

Our objective in this Working Paper is to find and explore what the most prevalent administrational 'trust problems' are in Flemish public administration according to Flemish Senior Civil Servants. This exploration is mainly intended to refine our focus on specific interorganisational interactions that are characterised as 'trust problems' in our further research.We present a conceptualisation of the distribution of administrational trust and distrust and conduct an exploratory quantitative assessment of interorganisational trust in Flemish public administration. Furthermore, we rely on qualitative interviews to explore a set of 16 'trust problems' in the Flemish administration. Our conclusions are that the trust granted to horizontal departments and the perceived trust received by the department of Administrative Affairs appear to be rather low compared to the other relations we surveyed, while trust granted to and received from political principals (cabinet and ministers) received the highest scores throughout the population. However, the only statistically significant differences between groups was explained by the length of respondents' employment in the organisation and their sex of respondents. The quantitative results suggested to narrow the focus of our future research to interorganisational relations with horizontal entities, as the relatively lower scores and the high variance of the responses regarding trust in horizontal entities allows effective study of its antecedents and effects. Our exploration of sixteen 'trust problems' in Flemish public administration confirm this prevalence of 'trust problems' in relations with horizontal departments, and leads us to conclude that a fundamental discussion of complex interorganisational interaction requires the identification of both trust and distrust, taking into account the extant tensions and pressures in a particular relational context.