ABSTRACT In the wake of New Public Management reforms, the prospect of increasing task performance by building trust within public organisations has awoken renewed interest in the public sector. The focus has, however, predominantly been on strengthening leaders’ trust in employees by offering the latter greater autonomy, while employees’ decisions to accept and return trust have received less attention. The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for studying how interactional and institutional trust interplay when employees in public organisations respond to leaders’ attempts to build trust by offering them greater autonomy. The conceptual framework is applied to a case study conducted in Copenhagen Municipality, which is actively engaged in a reform to strengthen trust. The results support the proposition that the optimal conditions for employees to accept offers of greater autonomy occur when they experience both high interactional and high institutional trust. However, the case study also illustrates that other factors such as horizontal trust, professional confidence and available resources also affect employees’ willingness to accept offers of greater autonomy.

中文翻译：

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鸟笼是开放的，但是鸟会飞吗？公共组织中的互动和机构信任如何相互作用

摘要在新的公共管理改革之后，通过在公共组织内部建立信任来提高任务绩效的前景唤醒了人们对公共部门的新兴趣。但是，重点主要放在通过提供更大的自主权来增强领导者对员工的信任，而员工接受和返回信任的决定受到的关注却较少。本文的目的是建立一个概念框架，研究公共组织中的员工通过提供更大的自治权来回应领导者建立信任的尝试时，相互作用和机构信任如何相互作用。该概念框架适用于在哥本哈根市进行的案例研究，该市正在积极进行改革以增强信任。结果支持这样的主张，即员工在经历高度互动和高度机构信任的同时，就会获得接受更大自治权的最佳条件。但是，案例研究还表明，诸如横向信任，专业信心和可用资源等其他因素也会影响员工接受更大自主权的意愿。