Trust is the engagement domain with the widest reach. It is not affection for leaders or agreement with their decisions — it is the belief that decisions are made in the open, for reasons that would survive being explained.
Leadership and trust is whether people believe their manager and senior leaders act in the open and in good faith. It has two distinct layers, and they move independently: trust in the immediate manager, and trust in the senior leadership of the organisation.
The distinction is practical. Someone can trust their manager completely and believe the executive team is not telling them the truth — or the reverse. Treating trust as a single number hides which of the two is failing, and they call for entirely different responses.
Note also what it is not. Trust is not popularity, and it is not agreement. People routinely trust leaders whose decisions they dislike, provided the reasoning is visible and consistently applied.
Trust is the domain that gates the others. Purpose requires believing the stated purpose is genuine. Growth requires believing that a promised path will be honoured. Connection erodes quickly in an environment where people are guarded.
It also determines the quality of every other measurement an organisation takes. In a low-trust environment people answer surveys strategically rather than honestly — which is why trust is not merely one domain among eight, but a precondition for knowing anything reliable about the rest.
Leadership and trust is scored 0–100 from behavioural statements bounded to a recent window, and separated by layer — immediate manager and senior leadership are asked about distinctly, because conflating them hides which relationship is failing.
The statements ask about observable conduct rather than sentiment: whether reasons for decisions were given, whether commitments were kept, whether concerns could be raised. “I trust leadership” invites a judgement; “I can raise concerns without worrying it will be held against me” describes a fortnight.
This is also the domain where the n=5 reporting threshold matters most. Trust items are the ones people most reasonably fear being identified by, and a manager who could infer an individual response would compromise the measure permanently.
Statement design, cadence and reporting thresholds: how the measurement works.
The manager relationship is where most trust is won or lost, and the levers are unglamorous. Explaining the reasoning behind decisions — including the ones handed down — is the single highest-return behaviour. Responding to raised concerns visibly, even when the answer is no, determines whether anyone raises the next one.
The most common failure is a manager acting as a conduit rather than an interpreter: passing decisions down without explanation, which reads as either indifference or ignorance. A manager who says “I disagreed and here is why we are doing it anyway” builds more trust than one who pretends to have no view.
Trust is also produced and destroyed structurally, independent of any individual’s conduct.
Information flow determines whether people learn things from their organisation or about it. Promotion and pay transparency determine whether outcomes look like judgements or like favours. Grievance and escalation routes determine whether raising something is safe in practice rather than in policy. Layoff and restructuring conduct resets the baseline for years — how an organisation behaves at its worst moment is what people remember about it.
None of those depend on individual managers being good at their jobs. A high-integrity manager inside an opaque system will still score poorly, and the system is what needs changing.
Trust relates to outcomes mainly through discretionary behaviour: what people do when no one is checking. Low trust does not usually reduce compliance — it reduces initiative, candour and the willingness to flag a problem early.
In our validation study, advocacy moved from 9% to 94% promoters between the bottom and top decile of the Thrive Index — a 155-point eNPS swing, and the single widest separation we measured on an independently observed variable. The leadership cascade figure is equally telling: Thrive rises with every management layer, 67.7 for individual contributors to 79.4 for managers of managers.
That gradient has a direct governance implication. The people assessing whether the organisation is healthy sit at the top of it, where the experience is measurably better than for everyone else.
Organisational psychology treats trust as a function of perceived ability, benevolence and integrity, and consistently finds procedural fairness — whether the process was fair — to matter as much as the outcome itself. Management research links psychological safety to error reporting and learning behaviour. Occupational health research associates low-trust environments with elevated strain independent of workload.
Our domain draws on that literature — 140+ peer-reviewed papers underpin the eight domains. The mechanisms are established; the magnitude in a particular organisation is not, which is what measurement supplies.
Engagement = Purpose + Leadership + Connection + Growth: what is employee engagement, and how the Engagement Index is scored.
Index figures come from thrive at work’s own validation study (n=10,000+, 2025–26), fielded across the US and Europe. Comparisons are bottom decile versus top decile of the Thrive Index unless stated otherwise.
The research described here draws on the published literature in organisational psychology, management research and occupational health. We summarise mechanisms that are well established in that literature rather than claiming novel findings, and the size of any effect in a specific workplace is not established by it. No score is shown for any group of fewer than five people.
A 30-minute call with the research team covers what a first measurement would surface, and how your sector compares.