Browsing by Subject "trust"

People constantly face environmental stimuli and appraise them as events of potential benefits (challenge appraisal) or events of harm and loss (threat appraisal). The reason why employees react to organisational changes as threats or challenges remains unclear in the literature. With an existing large panel of participants (OnlineResearch Finland), this Master’s thesis aimed to understand how employees’ trust towards their supervisor links with cognitive appraisals. Following previous research, the trust variable was further divided into reliance and disclosure. Based on Transactional Theory of Stress and Coping by Lazarus & Folkman, employee’s trust towards the supervisor was hypothesised to predict employees' reactions to organisational changes, in a way that trust would be positively related to challenge appraisals and negatively related to threat appraisal. Using Gillespie’s 10-item trust inventory, regression analysis indicated that both reliance and disclosure were positively related to challenge appraisal in single time-points, and negatively related to threat appraisal in over-time analysis. The results indicate trust has an important role in employees’ reactions to changes and hypotheses were partly accepted, but it seems employees' initial reactions derive from alternative factors, and further research is needed to better understand causal relations between these variables.

The topic of this study is to explore how the senior business leaders construct their attitudes and describe the role of trust in the context of business transformations related to the company's business and organization, for example during mergers or acquisitions (M&A) and hyper-growth. The focus of the study is on attitudes constructed by these leaders and observed through their argumentation when talking about trust. These attitudes and argumentation are examined from the theoretic-methodological approach of qualitative attitude approach, offering a unique angle to trust research, widely dominated by quantitative research. The qualitative attitude approach relies on rhetorical social psychology and constructivist viewpoint, which draws attention to the socially constructed nature of argumentation when examining attitudes. In the qualitative attitude approach, attitude is seen as relationist, where attitude is viewed to be built in argumentation. Examining the argumentation of speech provides new insights into the role of trust in an organization. The research data consisted of five individual interviews of experienced corporate executives in top management positions (members of the company’s executive leadership team or the board of directors). The interviews were conducted in the spring and summer of 2019. These semi-structured interviews consisted of seven attitude prompts to which comments were requested. Five prompts addressed trust within the organization and two addressed leadership. In their speech, the interviewees formed statements and justifications to the questions and topics at hand, substantiating and negotiating their views. The study identified 20 different attitude constructs related to trust and two attitude constructs related to leadership overall. These attitudes were constructed from the classification of statements and justifications that emerged from the interview material. According to the qualitative attitude approach, analysis was conducted on two levels: through classifying and interpretative analysis. Attitudes were interpreted based on six evaluative argumentation patterns when talking about trust, forming six rhetoric versions of trust: Trust as a relational and interactional phenomenon across different organizational levels, Trust as an organizational catalyst, Trust as an outcome of multidimensional elements, Trust as an intentional act, Trust as a collective construct, and Trust-building as a leadership skill. The senior leaders formed these versions of trust from four subject positions - Trustor, Trustee, Observer and Evaluator of Trust, and Active Trust Builder. Positive, conditional, and negative justifications, subject positions, self-reflection, framing, and social influence were used as rhetoric and social resources to form attitudes related to trust. In the trust speech of senior business leaders, trust is described as an atmosphere of common trust, building material, and a bedrock of the company, that must be consciously and collectively built within organizations. Modern leadership was described as a school of fish with collective intelligence, a team jointly creating success. Trust-building needs to be contributed by the whole organization but it’s also seen as a leadership skill just like budgeting. The benefits of trust for organizations are empirically indisputable. Trust helps an organization to bear and share risks, creates psychological safety at all levels of the organization as well as supports risk-taking and decision-making in transformational situations.

Trust and empowerment are popular management practices, with many big organizations having adopted initiatives involving the two concepts. Despite the popularity of these initiatives, most of them fail. To be able to design effective behavior change interventions we need to know what made the interventions successful or unsuccessful by evaluating them. Traditionally, effectiveness was evaluated but recently knowing why an intervention worked is perceived as essential. By understanding how participants of trust and empowerment initiatives perceive their acceptability, insights can be gained into why the intervention worked as it did. Intervention acceptability refers to how the intervention providers or receivers think or feel about an intervention. This study aims to examine the retrospective intervention acceptability, of an organizational pilot intervention focusing on trust and empowerment, from the perspective of the intervention recipients. To examine how the intervention participants perceive the acceptability of the intervention, the acceptability domains of the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability (TFA) will be used. As the TFA was developed for assessing the acceptability of healthcare interventions, the fit of the framework for assessing the acceptability of an organizational intervention will be evaluated. The study adopts a qualitative research methodology using theory-driven content analysis with a relativist perspective. The data was collected using online semi-structured focus group interviews. The sample included 12 team- or project leaders from different parts of the world. The results show that the intervention has high retrospective acceptability from the perspective of the intervention recipients. The participants mainly used the existing TFA domains in their construction of acceptability, with the addition of including appropriateness as a central domain. It, therefore, seems that the TFA works well for understanding how the participants of a trust and empowerment intervention conducted in an organizational setting, perceive its acceptability. It seems that the intervention is designed to suit the target group well, which increases the likelihood for a successful full-scale intervention when and if the organization decides to roll out the training on a larger scale. This study also provides insights into the applicability of using the TFA in a new context.

Objectives. According to the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 results Finnish elementary school teachers do not receive enough feedback about their performance. The ethical guidelines published by the Finnish Trade Union of Education outline that teachers should aim at understanding each student’s thinking and opinions. The Finnish basic education’s core curriculum (POPS 2014) that takes effect in the fall of 2016 highlights the importance of student involvement. The main objective of this study was to examine the value of students’ feedback in elementary schools. In addition, this study examines the reliability of elementary school students’ feedback. The aim is also to increase the interest towards students’ feedback among Finnish educators. The theoretical framework of this study consists of the personality Rogers’s theory on personality development, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory and Erikson’s theory on psychosocial development. Methodology. The study was implemented as a systematic literature review. The scientific material consisted of ten English-language peer-reviewed articles. Two of the articles were published in England, two in Holland, one in Belgium, one in Norway, three in the United States and one in Australia. The research material included also one Swedish-language doctoral dissertation published in Sweden. Results and conclusions. Soliciting feedback from students had a positive effect on both teachers and students. The students appreciated that teachers were interested in their opinions. The teachers received useful information related to the children’s views on school- and teacher-related issues. The answers provided by the children were to a large extent reliable. Doing research on teacher-student relationships and students’ feedback in Finnish elementary schools can provide valuable information to teachers and educators alike. Examining the silent information among students may foster stronger mutual understanding and interaction between teachers and students, increase the teachers’ job motivation and support the students’ learning.

Cryptocurrency emerged in response to a growing distrust in traditional financial systems, representing an attempt to re-imagine money on a global level. Unlike previous alternative currency movements, cryptocurrencies allowed greater scalability, portability, security and ‘more than money’ use-cases. This led to widespread adoption and narratives of cryptocurrency’s revolutionary potential. Since the invention of Bitcoin in 2008 more than 23,000 cryptocurrencies have been traded, along with the development of non-fungible tokens, decentralised autonomous organisations, and ‘metaverses’, which make up the new layer of internet infrastructure enthusiasts call ‘Web 3’. Alongside talk of cryptocurrencies’ speculative appeal, are visions of a blockchain-supported economy that are about much more than money: representing new forms of operating, living and imagining value. Yet others remain perplexed by the way value seemingly arises ‘out of nothing’. This thesis takes cryptocurrency as an opportunity to explore the social construction of value. Through seven months of fieldwork online and in Helsinki in 2022, it provides an ‘on the ground’ view from the cryptoscene. This work explores users’ motivations and understandings of value, their subjectivities, ideals and values, and the social relations that hold everything together. The study contributes findings that emphasise cryptocurrencies’ entanglement with ideological beliefs, values and ethical projects, suggesting cryptocurrency use extends beyond individual rational economization. Analysing ideals from the scene, the work highlights new labours and ethics which inform users’ subjectivities, encouraging self-responsibility, rationality and discipline. Despite the scene’s rhetoric of individualism, communities and social relations are found to play an important role in mediating trust and value, working to re-embed a notion of ‘the social’.

Sosiaalisen median kautta tapahtuva informaatiovaikuttaminen on herättänyt keskustelua niin kansallisesti kuin kansainvälisesti. Pro gradu -tutkielmassa “Poliittinen luottamus ja sen horjuttajat” tarkastellaan kansalaisten kokeman informaatiovaikuttamisen uhan suhdetta poliittiseen luottamukseen. Informaatiovaikuttamisen keinot ovat moninaisia. Tavoitteena saattaa olla esimerkiksi epäluottamuksen ja kahtiajaon lisääminen yhteiskunnassa. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on tunnistaa syvällisemmin kansalaisten kokemaan informaatiovaikuttamisen uhkaan vaikuttavat taustatekijät ja tutkia poliittisen luottamuksen yhteyttä siihen. Tämä tutkimusasetelma valittiin, koska poliittisen luottamuksen ja informaatiovaikuttamiseen liittyvien näkemysten yhteyttä ei ole Suomessa juuri tutkittu. Tutkimuksen lähestymistapaa pohjustetaan Pippa Norrisin virtuaalista poliittista järjestelmää käsittelevällä teorialla. Norrisin rinnalla esitellään Robert D. Putnamin sosiaalisen pääoman ja Pierre Rosanvallonin vastademokratian teoriat. Norrisin ja Putnamin käsitykset kansalaisten poliittisesta luottamuksesta ovat yhteydessä poliittisiin instituutioihin ja toimijoihin. Rosanvallonin tulkinta tarjoaa teoreettisen sillan demokraattisen poliittisen järjestelmän horjuttamiseen sen ulkopuolelta. Tutkielma toteutettiin tukeutumalla Ajatushautomo Magman keräämään kyselytutkimuksen aineistoon. ”Suomalaisten demokratiakäsityksiä ja yhteiskunnallisia mielipiteitä 2017” -aineistolle tehtiin aineistolähtöinen eksploratiivinen faktorianalyysi, josta voitiin tunnistaa neljä aineistossa piilevää ulottuvuutta: poliittinen luottamus, turvallisuuspoliittinen resilienssi, monikulttuurisuuteen suhtautuminen ja suhtautuminen kaksikielisyyteen. Eksploratiivisen faktorianalyysin yhteydessä tunnistetut faktorit muutettiin niin sanotuiksi faktoripistemuuttujiksi. Tämän jälkeen kansalaisten kokemaa informaatiovaikuttamisen uhkaa pyrittiin selittää ordinaaliregression avulla. Sen perusteella voidaan sanoa, että poliittinen luottamus ei selitä kansalaisten koettua informaatiovaikuttamisen uhkaa. Sen sijaan tutkimuksessa havaitut suhtautuminen monikulttuurisuuteen, kaksikielisyyteen, turvallisuuspoliittinen resilienssi ja taustamuuttujista ikä ja koulutustasoista lukiotausta näyttäisivät selittävän sitä. Ikä näyttäisi selittävän kansalaisten kokemaa informaatiovaikuttamista paremmin kuin poliittinen luottamus. Tutkielman haasteisiin kuuluu muun muassa kansalaisen kokeman informaatiovaikuttamisen uhan monitulkintaisuus. Samoin eksploratiivisesta faktorianalyysista nousseet ulottuvuudet ovat tulkinnanvaraisia. Toisaalta poliittinen luottamus on aineistolähtöisellä tilastollisella menetelmällä rajattu tarpeeksi perusteellisesti. Poliittinen luottamus ei selitä tässä tutkimuksessa kansalaisten kokemaa informaatiovaikuttamisen uhkaa. Tulos on yllättävä. Yhtäältä se voi viitata siihen, että informaatiovaikuttamisen keinot risteävät virtuaalisessa poliittisessa järjestelmässä kansalaisten institutionaalisten siteiden ulkopuolella. Tulos voi kertoa myös siitä, että luottamus ei välttämättä ole ilmiön olennaisin taustatekijä esimerkiksi sosioekonomisiin taustatekijöihin verrattuna. 2010-luvulla käynnissä olevien informaatiovaikuttamiseen liittyvien yhteiskunnallisten prosessien vuoksi aihetta olisi tutkittava lisää.

Online disinformation has been identified internationally as a concerning phenomenon due to its potential effects on communication, democracy, and the very conceptions of truth and reality. This thesis aims to examine the question of what factors may make societies resilient to disinformation. Based on the theoretical framework originally outlined in Humprecht et al.’s (2020) cross-country ranking of 18 Western democracies, this thesis analyzes how structural environmental factors at the country level may strengthen resilience to online disinformation in two countries: Finland and Poland. Based on longitudinal mixed methods analyses informed by international indices, reports, and national scholarship, this thesis analyzes the political, media, and economic environments of Finland and Poland to consider how these environments—colored by cultural, historical, and societal contexts—may contribute to each country’s respective resilience to disinformation. This within-case analysis shows the challenges of quantifying and ranking resilience to disinformation and to develop the theoretical framework further. While Finland has historically been found to perform well in resilience studies, its examination alongside the Polish case demonstrates the necessity of nuancing each factor, informed by questioning what each factor actually entails as well as the impact of country contexts. Indicators such as populist communication, public service media, and trust in news were revealed to be more complex than originally outlined in the framework when applied to two different country contexts. This thesis also identified two novel additions to further contribute to the framework: journalistic standards, roles, and ethics and media literacy. By proposing additions to the framework and critically discussing the interactions between factors, this thesis also identifies key areas of future research to contribute to the field of disinformation studies.

ABSTRACT When does a person have to think about writing a last will and structuring his assets and affairs so that his family members will lately inherit them or other people involved in his life? Surprisingly, not a lot of people start thinking of it early enough to protect wealth and assets to be smoothly and fully transferred to their family members or other heirs. The issue is complicated by the international aspect and the amount of wealth that a modern businessperson owns. The aim of the thesis is to study in depth and name the problems, indicate complexity and find solutions for inheritance succession planning of wealth with the tax perspective. The central figure of the paper is a rich wealth owner that is of HNWI or UHNWI level. Modern families have a lot of possibilities to live in several countries, expand and conduct business internationally, which brings certain complications when one of the family members passes away and the heirs suddenly find themselves in a situation, that half of the estate is given out to pay taxes in several countries, partly assets are stolen in the transition period by the advisors they have never heard about and part is simply lost; business enters crisis and does not provide enough income anymore as the heirs are not interested in the full engagement or are not educated in the sphere. Creditors are waiting around the corner and once having millions and comfortable life the heirs find themselves in a dubious situation. When the succession planning done beforehand, having enough time to structure wealth and assets, get to know tax exemptions and possible tools most of the assets can be retained. What are these tax laws or inheritance procedures that support the advantageous planning for wealth transfer? To provide not a general but a more detailed perspective on differences in procedures, tax regulations and possible solutions, comparative analysis of three jurisdictions is completed. The thesis looks closely into tax optimization rules and instruments such as gifts, trusts and foundations and life insurances. Advantages of the instruments are indicated in general prospective and applying them in concrete legislations and situations. In conclusion, the thesis presents an overview, a practical imaginary situation, and a plan for the wealth owner to adhere. Of importance, for understanding is to mention that concrete situation of each wealth owner is complicated and needs to be analyzed in detail in the context of the entire structure and its relationship with other components.