When a team is struggling, the first suspicion is often that people do not trust the boss. Research on trust and performance suggests the picture may be wider than that. A meta-analysis of 57 studies found that trust among colleagues was more strongly linked with work performance, in the pooled results, than trust in leaders. Such links are associations and give no assurance that a trust initiative would lift performance.
The article, written by Espinoza, Ríos-Leal, Villacura-Herrera, Pérez and Acosta-Antognoni, came out on 31 May 2025 in the journal Psychology, Society & Education. A meta-analysis gathers the results of many earlier studies and combines them statistically. This one used 57 studies found by searching three databases. The journal page does not give a combined number of participants, and it does not say which countries the studies came from.
The team separated two kinds of trust. Vertical trust means trust in leaders and top management. Horizontal trust means trust among peers. They then looked at three levels of performance: in-role performance, which concerns assigned duties; extra-role performance, which means voluntary contributions beyond the formal job; and overall organisational performance. Age and gender were also tested as possible moderators, meaning factors that might change the strength of the links.
Across the performance outcomes, vertical trust had weak yet statistically significant pooled associations. Horizontal trust had stronger pooled correlations at each performance level.
The published page gives neither the pooled correlation coefficients nor the confidence intervals, so the strength of the relationships cannot be stated more precisely here. No exact productivity gain is reported, and none should be assumed.
Among the moderators, age was reported as a significant negative one, whereas gender did not reach significance in the reported analysis. These are findings about patterns across studies. They are not a basis for predicting how trusting, or how productive, any individual worker will be because of their age or gender. The non-significant result for gender also should not be read as proof that all groups have the same experience at work.
The research concerned performance. It did not measure engagement, and it should not be described as showing an effect on engagement. The distinction between assigned duties and voluntary extra effort is also worth keeping in mind, because trust may relate differently to each, and a single headline figure would hide that.
A meta-analysis can combine many studies, but pooled associations still do not show that a trust-building programme causes better performance. Trust and performance may rise together for other reasons, or good performance may build trust. The design cannot separate those possibilities.
The missing detail matters too. Without the pooled estimates, intervals and participant count, it is hard to say how large the differences between peer trust and leader trust really are, or how well they would translate into predictions for a particular workplace.
The findings do not show that leaders are unimportant, that peer trust alone decides performance, or that managers should always put peer trust ahead of trust in leadership. Workplace rules, cultures and expectations differ between countries and organisations, and this is general information, not Australian workplace advice.
Even so, the comparison widens the conversation. Work means coordinating with colleagues as well as answering to a manager, and a team can falter in either place. You could consider whether people grasp the decisions made above them, whether colleagues can count on each other to complete joint work, or whether both kinds of relationship need attention. Such questions suit local discussion; the meta-analysis did not establish any effects here.
One practical use of the idea is to pin down which relationship you are curious about. Are you asking about confidence in what leaders decide, or about teammates delivering on shared duties? Being specific can make a conversation easier to act on, though trust alone is not promised to change performance.
Source: A meta-analytic examination of the association between vertical and horizontal trust and the in-role, extra role, and organizational levels of performance DOI: 10.21071/pse.v17i2.17570
Conceptual illustration of trust among colleagues and leaders. AI-generated editorial illustration. This article summarises published research in our own words and is general information, not personal health advice.
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