Maryia, Vitaly, and Anupam sit down with Asya Isakova — an organisational psychologist who's been studying how people function at work since 2007 — to explore her BeyondQuality research on trust in teams. The most counterintuitive finding: trust matters most in hierarchical organisations, precisely the ones that tend to destroy it with KPIs and approval chains. In high-hierarchy teams, subordinates decide what information to share based on whether they trust their manager — and if they don't, the entire decision chain corrupts. The conversation unpacks how lack of trust works like a tax: full workdays wasted on two-minute tasks, teams of 20 writing reports instead of working, $15 purchase orders going through five approvals. Why vulnerability — the core of trust — is the hardest thing for leaders to accept. And why preventive quality work like pair programming or shifting testing left simply cannot start without trust: you can't prove a prevented bug, so if nobody trusts you, nobody lets you try.

Links:

1. Asya's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asyaisakova/

2. Asya's research proposal: https://github.com/BeyondQuality/beyondquality/discussions/26

3. Organizational Justice meta-analysis: https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2013-06399-001

4. Trust factors and performance review: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1081086/full

5. Team factors and trust: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/job.2436

Sponsors:

1. Qase https://qase.io/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=beyondquality&utm_campaign=devadvocacy

2. Regent https://regent.se

3. AnuKrit https://anukrit.de