Interdisciplinary Perspective of Trust

It's trust that is the key determinant of any collaborative effort, such as innovation and transformation for solving critical problems and advancing human society. 

People live in a global society in which they have to play different roles in social interaction and participate in social activities. Trust is a measure of the quality of a relationship between people, groups, or between people and an organization.
 Trust is a two-way street, which plays a key role in the effective functioning of both society and organizations. Trust can be enhanced from cross-disciplinary angles by considering the following:

Communication and Collaboration: Encourage cross-functional communication and participation by bringing together teams of representatives from each stage of a project to coordinate processes better and identify and avoid problems.

Skills: Technical professionals must have up-to-date knowledge of their technical disciplines and skills in communication, problem-solving, and group decision-making processes essential for successful teamwork.

Transparency: Transparency is integral to political goals, including corruption control, fair financing of election campaigns, enhancing democracy, consolidating democracy in transitional societies, and limiting international conflict. In business, it is a safeguard against corporate fraud, infiltration by organized crime or political interests, and financial crises.

Leadership: Project leaders should motivate, lead, and coordinate team members while representing the group’s interests in the larger organization by advocating for the team’s project and winning the support and resources needed to get the job done.

Barriers to cross-disciplinary trust? Barriers to cross-disciplinary trust can include:

-Mental Set: Entrenched ways of thinking can cause individuals to fixate on strategies that are not effective for the problem at hand. People can become so used to doing things a certain way that it becomes difficult to switch to a more effective approach.

-Functional Fixedness: This is the inability to realize that something known to have a particular use may also be used to perform other functions, which blocks the ability to use old tools in novel ways when faced with a new problem.

-Stereotypes: Generalized beliefs about the characteristics of a social group can prevent individuals from seeing situations and people for who or what they are.

-Negative Transfer: When solving an earlier problem makes later problems harder to solve.

-Hierarchical Organizations: Specialization and formalization in hierarchical organizations can stabilize expectations and behaviors of their members, but can also hinder flexible and adaptive governance.

Trust cannot be forced. True trust has to be nurtured from the soil and in combination with appropriate micro and macro climates. It's trust that is the key determinant of any collaborative effort, such as innovation and transformation for solving critical problems and advancing human society. 

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