How Can Top Leadership Build Intra-Organisational Trust Across Hierarchical Levels?

In the last decade, trust-based governance approaches have gained prominence in public administration as a means of enhancing motivation, cooperation and effectiveness. However, the development of trust across different layers in multi-level organisations is particularly complex. Top-level leadership must be willing to make itself vulnerable despite being unable to interact directly with the entire organisation to assess staff trustworthiness. Moreover, while intra-organisational trust may emerge from the interplay between institutional and interactional trust, it remains unclear how this interplay can be effectively orchestrated across organisational levels. This observation begs the question: How can top-level leadership build intra-organisational trust across hierarchical levels? This article explores an empirical case in which top-level leadership successfully advanced intra-organisational trust across municipal levels. Based on analysis of the interplay among different forms of trust, the study identifies three central factors that explain how top-level leadership successfully developed trust. These include an initial act of trust by top-level leaders, a mutually reinforcing interplay between institutional and interactional trust, and the establishment of dialogue-supporting structures that enabled interactional trust to emerge. The article offers recommendations for practitioners and underscores the need for further research in trust development across multiple levels.