Written by Michiel R. De Boer
I remember a conversation with a finance manager. Sharp, composed, the kind of person who chooses her words carefully and means every one of them. She had been with her organisation for eleven years. She was not leaving. She was not planning to leave. But something had shifted in how she showed up, and she knew it.“I stopped going the extra distance,” she said. “Not in a dramatic way. I still do my job. I do it well. But the thing I used to do: the initiative, the staying late to get something right, the bringing an idea nobody asked for, that stopped. And I can tell you the exact moment it stopped.”She could. It was the moment she found out, six months after a company-wide cost-cutting announcement that had asked everyone to tighten their belts, that the executive committee had approved bonuses for themselves. Not large ones. But bonuses.“It wasn’t about the money,” she said. “It’s that they asked us to believe something, and then they quietly didn’t believe it themselves.”This is what the trust contract looks like when it breaks. Not dramatically. Quietly. In the private decision of a high-performing individual to withdraw the discretionary part of their effort: the part that was never in the job description, the part that cannot be mandated, the part that is the difference between a workforce and a community.What The Trust Contract Actually Is
The concept of the psychological contract has been developed most rigorously by organisational scholar Denise Rousseau, whose landmark work in the 1990s named something most experienced professionals already knew: that the relationship between a person and their organisation is governed by two entirely different sets of expectations.The formal contract is what you signed. Job scope, salary, reporting line, performance expectations. It is written down, legally enforceable, and relatively clear.The psychological contract is everything else. The unwritten expectations: that hard work will be recognised, that feedback will be given honestly, that the organisation’s stated values will actually govern its decisions, that a person will be treated as a human being rather than a resource. These expectations are never written down. They are rarely discussed. But they are felt intensely, by everyone, from the moment someone joins an organisation.When those unwritten expectations are honoured, people invest more than what is asked. They bring ideas. They stay late because they want to, not because they were told to. They cover for a colleague, flag a problem they were not assigned to solve, invest in the team’s success because the team’s success feels like their own.When those expectations are violated, and Rousseau’s research is clear that violations are not always dramatic, they can be subtle, cumulative, and even unintentional: the withdrawal is immediate and often permanent. People do not storm out. They recalibrate. They revise their mental model of what this organisation actually is, and they adjust their investment accordingly.The crucial insight is that this contract is bilateral. The organisation has expectations of the employee: performance, commitment, conduct. The employee has expectations of the organisation: fairness, honesty, opportunity, care. Both sets of expectations are real. Both sets of expectations determine outcomes. Most organisations manage only one side of that equation.
Why This Matters More Than Engagement Surveys Can Measure
Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 23 percent of employees worldwide describe themselves as engaged at work. In Southeast Asia, the numbers are lower. The majority of the global workforce (more than three in four people) are either disengaged or actively disengaged, going through the motions of work without any real investment in its outcome.
These numbers are cited frequently in leadership circles. They are treated, most of the time, as a motivation problem or a culture problem or a management capability problem. What they rarely get named as is a trust problem: a failure of the bilateral contract at scale.
And the cost of that failure is not visible in most financial reports.
It lives in the quality of decisions that do not get made because the person who saw the problem early decided not to raise it. It lives in the innovation that does not happen because people have learned that ideas that cross departmental lines get quietly parked. It lives in the knowledge that leaves the organisation when a high performer decides to stop going the extra distance, not with a resignation letter, but with a private, invisible recalibration.
Research on discretionary effort (the additional contribution people choose to make beyond the minimum required) consistently shows that it is this effort, not the contracted minimum, that drives organisational performance. A team of people at 60 percent engagement produces qualitatively different results from the same team at 90 percent. The gap is not in compliance. It is in initiative, creativity, collaboration, and the willingness to do what needs doing before being asked.
The trust contract is the mechanism that determines where on that spectrum people sit.
The 3 Most Common Violations: And Why They Are So Rarely Intentional
In my experience, the majority of trust contract violations in organisations are not caused by leaders who do not care. They are caused by leaders who are managing a system that makes trust-destroying behaviour structurally likely.
The announcement-behaviour gap is the most pervasive. An organisation states a value: “people are our greatest asset,” “we are committed to transparency,” “we reward performance”, and then behaves in a way that contradicts it. The strategy document says innovation is valued. The last person who challenged a senior manager’s direction in a meeting was quietly moved sideways. People notice. They always notice. And they adjust.
The damage here is not the individual inconsistency. It is the lesson it teaches: that the stated values are for external consumption, and the real values are revealed under pressure. Once that lesson is learned, it is very hard to unlearn.
The feedback void is the second violation, and it is rarely intentional. A manager is busy. Quarterly reviews are administratively cumbersome. The day-to-day urgency of delivery crowds out the developmental conversations that people need to feel seen, understood, and growing. The employee does good work and hears nothing. Does average work and hears nothing. Begins to wonder whether their contribution registers at all.
Self-Determination Theory, which Deci and Ryan have spent four decades developing, identifies autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the three core drivers of intrinsic motivation. Mastery: the ongoing development of skill and capability, is one of the most powerful. And mastery requires feedback. Not annual feedback delivered in a structured review, but the kind of regular, specific, timely feedback that lets a person understand what they are doing well, what they can improve, and that the work they are doing is seen by someone who matters.
When feedback disappears, one of the three pillars of intrinsic motivation disappears with it.
The promise that evaporates is the third violation. A leader makes a commitment during a difficult moment: a restructure, a hiring freeze, a period of required sacrifice, that is forgotten once the difficult moment has passed. Not deliberately forgotten. Simply not followed through. The team that was told “we will revisit your resourcing once the project stabilises” is still waiting two years later. The professional who was told “there will be a path to promotion” watches the promotion go to someone hired from outside.
None of these leaders are, in most cases, acting in bad faith. They are managing competing priorities, and the commitment made in a one-to-one conversation loses to the pressure of the next crisis. But the person who received that commitment experienced a contract, and experienced it being broken.
What It Costs: And Why Organisations Usually Do Not See It
The damage from trust contract violations is almost entirely invisible to standard organisational metrics.
Revenue does not fall the day a high performer recalibrates. Productivity does not drop sharply when a team’s discretionary effort withdraws. The compliance numbers stay the same: people still show up, still complete their tasks, still file their reports. What changes is the quality of judgment, the initiative behind problem-solving, the willingness to collaborate across boundaries, and the speed at which knowledge moves through the organisation.
These are the capabilities that determine whether a strategy becomes real or stays on a slide. And they are exactly the capabilities that cannot be replaced by process redesign or technology investment.
In APAC organisational contexts particularly, there is an additional layer. In cultures where direct expression of dissatisfaction is not the norm, where harmony is a genuine value and not a social nicety, trust erosion is especially invisible. People do not leave difficult feedback in exit interviews. They do not raise concerns in team meetings. They express their withdrawal through quieter channels: through the quality of the effort they bring, the ideas they do not offer, the collaboration they technically complete but do not invest in. The organisation’s formal feedback mechanisms are calibrated to a communication style that many of its people will never use.
The most important data about trust in many APAC organisations lives in the things that are not being said.
What To Do: Practical Recommendations For Leaders And Organisations
Start by auditing the announcement-behaviour gap. Take the last three values your organisation publicly affirmed: in a town hall, a strategy document, a leadership message. For each one, ask honestly: what happened in the last twelve months that confirmed this value, and what happened that contradicted it? The contradictions are not always obvious. Sometimes they are structural. A value of “transparency” contradicted by a budget process that nobody below senior management can see. A value of “collaboration” contradicted by a performance management system that only measures individual output.
The point is not self-recrimination. The point is to close the gap before it teaches the wrong lesson one more time.
Rebuild the feedback cadence: not the system, the habit. Most organisations have a performance management system. Very few have a feedback culture. The difference is whether managers have the skill and the habit of giving specific, timely, developmental feedback in the flow of work, not at the end of a quarter, not in a form, not as an evaluation. The research on feedback frequency and motivation is consistent: infrequent feedback, however well-structured, is not a substitute for the regular signal that says “I see what you are doing, and I have something useful to tell you about it.”
This is a capability question before it is a culture question. Most managers were never taught to give feedback well. They need practice, not policy.
Honour the small commitments. The large promises: promotions, pay reviews, role changes, get tracked. The small ones, “I will follow up on that,” “we will revisit this next quarter,” “I want to have a proper conversation about your development”, are the ones that slip through the cracks, and the ones that do the most cumulative damage to trust.
A practical discipline: at the end of every one-to-one conversation, write down any commitment you made. Not in a system. In a notebook. And review it before the next conversation. This sounds almost embarrassingly simple. It is. And the number of managers who do it consistently is very small.
Create legitimate channels for the things that are not being said. In high power-distance cultures, this is non-trivial. Anonymous surveys often produce data that is directionally useful but too general to act on. What works better, in my experience, is creating the conditions in which a trusted intermediary can surface the systemic patterns: not attributing them to individuals, not airing grievances publicly, but naming the category of the problem clearly enough that leadership can address it at the level of the system rather than the individual incident.
This is slow work. It requires leaders who can receive uncomfortable information without reacting to it defensively. And it requires those leaders to be visibly seen to act on what they hear. Once, people will believe it happened by coincidence. Twice, they will believe it might be real. Three times, they will start to trust the channel.
Honour the small commitments. The large promises: promotions, pay reviews, role changes, get tracked. The small ones, “I will follow up on that,” “we will revisit this next quarter,” “I want to have a proper conversation about your development”, are the ones that slip through the cracks, and the ones that do the most cumulative damage to trust.
A practical discipline: at the end of every one-to-one conversation, write down any commitment you made. Not in a system. In a notebook. And review it before the next conversation. This sounds almost embarrassingly simple. It is. And the number of managers who do it consistently is very small.
The Bilateral Truth
The trust contract is bilateral. This is the thing that most organisational interventions miss. Loyalty programmes, recognition schemes, employee experience initiatives: all of these operate on one side of the equation, doing something for the employee. But the contract is not transactional in that way. It is not a trade of benefits for engagement. It is a relationship, and relationships are sustained by consistency, honesty, and the willingness to hold up your side even when it is inconvenient.
The finance manager who stopped going the extra distance did not need a better benefits package. She needed the organisation to believe what it had asked her to believe.
That is the trust contract. It is the most basic thing. And it echoes through everything else in this series, because every story that follows is, in some way, a story about what happens when it breaks.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the last time your organisation asked its people to believe something: a stated value, a public commitment, a direction from leadership.
What did the organisation’s behaviour in the following months actually demonstrate about whether those at the top believed it too?
If the gap between what was said and what was demonstrated is visible to you, it is visible to everyone. The question is not whether it exists. It is how long it has been teaching the wrong lesson.
This is Piece 1 of an 11-part series exploring the patterns behind organisational dysfunction: and what the GITO® Approach reveals about addressing them at the system level.
The next piece: The new hire who was exceptional in interview, underwhelming in role: and why the problem usually starts before someone even begins.