Teams: Understanding Trust Dynamics

On building trust in teams

In the first article, we looked at what Amy Edmondson calls teaming, which she identifies as the capacity to coordinate, collaborate, and adapt with people you may barely know and, in some situations, do not work with for long. We summarised four behaviours that effective teaming requires: speaking honestly, collaborating across differences, experimenting under uncertainty, and reflecting together on what has and has not worked. In the second article, we considered the process of joining, belonging, and leaving. All these behaviours depend on trust.⁠¹

In teams, trust accumulates via our shared experience. For several years, I ran a camp called Camp Beyond, which involved ten days in the Australian bush, with young people between fourteen and sixteen, many of them not Christians. Our main aim was to help them know Jesus, but we wanted to do that in the context of formation. The programme included Bible study, creating and recording music and art, abseiling, caving, and group times with facilitated discussions on both personal and shared issues. The centrepiece of each camp was a three-day bushwalk into rugged bush with groups of five or six young people led by two camp leaders.

Besides the snakes, the occasional swollen river, and the unrelenting Australian heat, we sometimes had to manage a genuine crisis. On one occasion, halfway through the bushwalk, one of the leaders locked his jaw open. He had to walk for a day and a half before we could get him to help. There were no phones and no easy exit. Having a team that trusted each other was paramount.

For the camp to have its full impact, we needed people with a wide range of skills: cooks, musicians, artists, leaders who could give gospel talks, people who understood group work with teenagers and knew how to handle conflict and misbehaviour, because on more than one occasion, we had to send someone home. For each three-day bushwalk, we needed people who were competent in bushcraft and bushwalking. Not everyone could have all the skills. What everyone needed was the ability to trust the people around them and to be trustworthy themselves. As the director, they needed to trust me, too. But trust, I came to understand, has more than one dimension.

Two Kinds of Trust

One useful distinction comes from research into organisational behaviours it seperates trust into two types that coexist in any team but function quite differently.²

Affective trust is about intentions. It is the sense that this person wishes me well, that they will not use what I share against me, that I am safe enough to be honest. When affective trust is present, teams share their thinking. When it is absent, people in teams manage their presence. They say the safe thing and keep the real thing to themselves.³

At Camp Beyond, affective trust showed when a leader could sit with a young person in difficulty or was willing to be honest about their own struggles in front of the camp; it said something that structured activities could not convey. The young people knew the difference between a leader who was genuine and one who was pretending, and so did the rest of the team. Affective trust was built within the team as we learned to face challenges together, such as the time we had to search for teenagers who had set off on their own during the three-day bushwalk.

Cognitive trust is about competence. It rests on the confidence that a person will do what they say they will do and that others can plan around their commitments. It is built not through warmth, but through evidence that incudes consistent follow-through and an their honesty about limits.

With abseiling and the three-day hikes, cognitive trust was non-negotiable. The abseiling instructor needed to know the ropes and all the safety procedures; people’s lives were at risk otherwise. On the bushwalks, at least one leader in each group had to be able to read maps and terrain, know where to pitch tents, ration food, and make sound decisions when things went wrong. Having good EQ was not enough.

For teams to function effectively, both matter: a team where people feel safe but cannot rely on each other will be warm but ineffective, whereas a team in which people are competent, although they feel unsafe, will be functional but closed.

These two types of trust take different amounts of time to build and break down in different ways. Affective trust can form quickly in the right conditions. Cognitive trust, by contrast, is slower. It is built through accumulated evidence of reliability, and usually erodes faster than it forms. Failure to follow through on a commitment or inability to carry the responsibilities of a role are the types of behaviours that undermine cognitive trust.

At Camp Beyond, both of these forms of trust were tested. The ten days teaming together compressed what usually takes much longer. What was unique was that the camp formed not only young people but also us, showing us what trust looks like when the stakes are high.

Both types of trust can fail. Affective trust breaks down when people hide what they are actually thinking and feeling out of fear of how they will be received. Cognitive trust breaks down when people care more about appearing capable than being reliable, overstating what they can do, staying silent about what they cannot do, and letting others down by not remaining true to commitments. In different ways, both failures have the same root: we are trying to secure ourselves.

A Gospel Lens

The Bible, too, is deeply concerned with the issue of trust. Proverbs 3:5–6 .

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”

Andrew Errington’s reading of Proverbs is instructive here. He suggests this wisdom is not primarily about a human capacity or personal discipline but about something embedded in the world by God, real paths woven into creation, calling out to be walked. To lean on your own understanding is to navigate by the wrong map.⁴

Both trust failures described here are ways of navigating by the wrong map. We project certainty to protect our reputation, or hide what we really think because our standing feels fragile. In different ways, we try to secure ourselves and lean on our own understanding, only to find we’ve been following the wrong map.

Affective trust requires that you say what you think at the appropriate time without depending on how it is received. Cognitive trust, on the other hand, requires the willingness to be truthful about what you can and cannot do, even when it costs you. Neither comes naturally, because both expose us and left to ourselves, we will always find ways to manage how we are seen.

The gospel deals with this not by telling us to try harder, but by securing what we are trying to secure for ourselves. Our standing is not determined by how we are viewed within a team because it has already been established in Christ. It does not rise and fall with our last contribution or our last failure. When that truth enters our hearts, the need to protect an image is less alluring.

The leaders at Camp Beyond who had that freedom were recognisable and were not the ones performing for others’ approval. They were the ones who could say, “I don’t know,” or “I’ve been there,” without pretending because they were not trying to secure their identity in that moment.

The gospel also shows us what trust looks like when every other experiential indicator points in the opposite direction. On the cross, Jesus entrusted himself to the Father in a situation of complete felt abandonment. As Calvin observed, what makes his cry on the cross so amazing is that he does not speak from a place of felt closeness. He feels forsaken and estranged, and yet he still says, “My God, my God,” and “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”. He tells the truth about his experience, and he entrusts himself to the Father. ⁵

This is not first a model for us to imitate. It is something Jeus did in our place. Where we protect ourselves, he entrusted himself fully. Where we manage what others see, he was exposed completely. And because he did, our standing with God is not fragile. It is secure. Only from there does it begin to become possible for us to live differently.

What might the Bible have to say about cognitive trust?

Cognitive trust becomes a matter of stewardship. Our time, our competence, and our commitments are not ours to use to secure an identity. They are entrusted to us for the sake of others. The same eschatological realism that directs how we join and leave teams as stewards rather than owners applies equally to what we bring while we are on a team.⁶ That means telling the truth about what we can do, and then doing what we said we would do, not to establish our worth, but to serve.

At Camp Beyond, we all failed at difreent times but some examples stand out. The leader who overstated their bushwalking experience didn’t just create a logistical problem; they put lives at risk and undermined trust within the team. The leader who stayed silent about their limitations never moved beyond the surface, thereby weakening a programme meant to form young people more deeply. Different as they were, both ultimately fractured trust.

Affective trust breaks down when we hide our actual thinking out of fear. Cognitive trust breaks down when people care more about appearing capable than about being reliable, overstating what they can do, staying silent about what they cannot do, and letting others down. In different ways, both failures have the same root: we are trying to secure ourselves.

In many cultural settings across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the cost of these failures of trust is compounded by honour-and-shame dynamics. Where losing face carries a social penalty that goes well beyond discomfort, the barriers to honest speech and the admission of limitation are considerably higher. The gospel speaks directly to this. In Christ, our honour is not achieved but given, as the one who was publicly shamed Jesus has secured an honour that does not fluctuate with circumstances.

What the Gospel offers is not a technique for building trust more quickly, but a reorientation of how we live and act within a team. We are no longer primarily managing our reputation or trying to secure our place. Instead, we are freed to tell the truth, to keep our word, and to trust, because what we most need to secure has already been secured for us.

In fluid teams, trust cannot wait. It has to be built on the move, often with people we barely know, in conditions that are not ideal. The Gospel does not remove that reality. But it does remove something else: the need to secure ourselves within it.

• What does it cost you, in your current team, to say what you actually think?

• Where does your word become less reliable because something else matters more than being truthful?

• When do you underperform because you pretend you know?

These are questions about what we are trusting. And over time, they become questions about whether we are still trying to secure ourselves in the team, or whether we are beginning, however imperfectly, to live from something that has already been secured for us.⁷

1. Amy C. Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012). This summary also draws on training material developed by Dr Paul Lawrance, drawing on Edmondson’s framework.

2. The affective/cognitive trust distinction is drawn from Daniel J. McAllister, “Affect- and Cognition-Based Trust as FoOrganisations Interpersonal CooperatiOrganisationsations,” Academy of Management Journal 38, no. 1 (1995): 24–59. The framework is further developed in Building Trust, Team Leader Instruction Manual Resource (n.d.).

3. Building Trust, Team Leader Instruction Manual Resource.

4. Andrew Errington, Every Good Path: Wisdom and Practical Reason in Christian Ethics and the Book of Proverbs (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Errington argues that wisdom in Proverbs is not reducible to moral instruction but is grounded in the order God has woven into creation — an order that calls to be found and walked rather than constructed from within.

5. Timothy Keller, “Calvin on ‘He Descended into Hell,’” derekzrishmawy.com, July 31, 2017, https://derekzrishmawy.com/2017/07/31/calvin-on-he-descended-into-hell-guest-post-by-tim-keller/. The argument draws on John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.16.8–12, and on Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Christ’s Agony.” Keller summarises Edwards’ point: to the first Adam God said, obey me, and I will be with you — but he did not. To the second Adam, he said, obey me, and I will forsake you — and yet he still obeyed.

6. The stewardship and already-not-yet frame used here is developed more fully in the preceding article in this series.

7. I use AI as an augmenting tool to help me clarify my thinking, conduct research, assess my work, and serve as an editor. The ideas, ways of thinking, experiences, and stories are the result of my thinking, my reading, and my working through these issues.