TrustLAB Translates - Why Trust Matters When We Fail: How Manager Responses Shape Employee Behaviour

Failure to attain important work goals is a common but emotionally impactful experience for employees. Missed targets, unsuccessful projects, or stalled career progression can disrupt expectations of competence and progress, often leading to negative emotions like sadness or anger and prompting reflection on whether further effort is worthwhile. While dealing with failure is usually thought of as an individual coping process, emerging evidence suggests our reactions to failure are shaped by the work relationships around us. Specifically, our recent paper considers how manager responses in the aftermath of employee failure plays a role in shaping how employees interpret the setback and decide how to proceed.

Building on our previous work on government leader strategies for managing citizen emotions, our latest paper shows that the way managers respond to employees’ following goal failure shapes their next steps primarily through its impact on trust. Particularly when employees feel uncertain about next steps, trust in the manager becomes a critical psychological resource, shaping whether employees adapt constructively to failure or abandon their goals.

Failure as a Moment of Vulnerability

When employees experience failure to achieve a work goal that is important to them, they enter a period of heightened sensitivity when their confidence in their competence might be shaken, future prospects can appear uncertain, and the meaning of continued effort within the organisation may be questioned. At this stage, employees tend to be highly attentive to relational cues from their colleagues as they try to gauge how others interpret and respond to the failure. Immediate managers or supervisors are often the most important source of this information since they play such a central role in performance management and career progression. 

Managerial responses to employee failure can do much more than address immediate distress. They shape how employees make sense of the failure and evaluate their options going forward, including whether to disengage their effort from an unattainable goal, commit to alternative goals, or withdraw psychologically or behaviourally from the organisation altogether. In this context, how much an employee trusts their manager becomes particularly salient. Trust reflects an employee’s willingness to accept vulnerability under conditions of uncertainty, and our research suggests it influences what employees see as viable options for dealing with their failure.

Manager Interpersonal Emotion Regulation

We used a concept called interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) to think about the different sorts of responses a manager might offer. IER is defined as deliberate attempts to shape how others feel. IER strategies vary along two dimensions: the underlying motive (to improve or worsen emotion) and the type of engagement (to engage directly with the source of distress or redirect attention).  Effective use of IER is a potential trust-building mechanism; it signals both a desire to help and a competence in responding to others’ emotional experiences. However, we don’t know enough about specific IER strategies yet to tell which strategy might be most effective in a failure situation.

Across two experimental studies involving 1,148 participants, we examined four commonly observed managerial IER strategies following employee failure:

• Emotion-improving cognitive engagement strategy, which seeks to alter how employees interpret the failure, for example, by encouraging reinterpretation or reframing of the setback. This manager might say “How about we think about it this way…..”
• Emotion-improving affective engagement strategy, which aims to improve employees’ emotional states by directly addressing the failure itself. This includes acknowledging the setback, identifying barriers, and outlining concrete pathways forward. This manager might say “Let's work out how to move forward from here…..”
• Emotion-improving distraction strategy, which redirects attention away from the failure toward alternative tasks or interactions. This manager might say “The best use of your time now would be to focus on…..”
• Emotion-worsening rejection strategy involves dismissing, minimising, or criticising an employee’s experience. While such responses are sometimes used in a task-focused way to push someone to move on or refocus on performance, they can leave the person feeling unheard and may negatively affect motivation and morale. A manager might respond in a brief, dismissive manner, for example:  “I don’t see why you are worrying about this…..”

We examined how these strategies relate to employees’ emotions, trust in their manager and behaviour following failure.

Why Engagement-Oriented Strategies Foster Trust

Following a failure, not all IER strategies build trust equally: strategies that worsen emotions undermine it, while even strategies intended to improve emotions do not always build trust consistently. Our findings indicate that strategies that engage directly with the failure itself (i.e., emotion-improving affective engagement strategies) are particularly effective at building trust when the setback remains salient. By addressing the underlying issue and offering concrete support, managers signal reliability, competence, and concern for the employee’s welfare which can not only improve trust but also lead to the most positive paths forward in dealing with failure.

By contrast, strategies that deflect attention away from the failure or rely on reframing how people think about their failure were associated with less consistent trust outcomes. While such strategies may reduce discomfort in the short term, they may be perceived as less constructive if they are used before a viable path forward has been established. Across studies, rejection strategies fared the worst, underscoring the relational benefits of supportive managerial responses.

Why Trust Matters More Than Emotion Alone

While reducing negative emotions after failure is valuable, managerial responses exert their strongest behavioural effects through trust rather than just emotion alone. Negative emotions played a more limited and context-dependent role impacting how likely people were to consider leaving their jobs but not impacting their ability to adjust their goals following failure. Alleviating distress may ease immediate discomfort; it does not provide an environment where employees can adapt. Trust, by contrast, reflects a willingness to accept vulnerability and risk, and this willingness is central to moving forward constructively. 

Implications for Managers and Organisations

These findings underscore that managerial IER responses to failure are not merely acts of emotional support, but forms of interpersonal influence with consequences for their relationships with their employees and employee behaviour. The choice of IER strategy shapes trust judgments that, in turn, influence whether employees adapt, persist, or withdraw. For managers, responding to failure is not only about alleviating distress, but about signalling their reliability, care, and competence at a moment of heightened vulnerability. 

For organisations, the findings reinforce that trust is not an abstract value but a practical resource. In environments where failure is inevitable, trust allows setbacks to be navigated constructively rather than becoming sources of disengagement or talent loss.

Read the full paper here: Naughton, B., O'Shea, D., & van der Werff, L. (2025). Reactions to goal failure: Manager's interpersonal emotion regulation and employees' trust, affect, and behavioral intentions. Applied Psychology, 74(6), e70057. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.70057

Author: Dr. Bernadette Naughton, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Science and Health, Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest, Athlone Campus, University Road, Athlone, Westmeath, Ireland.N37HD68.

Email: bernadette.naughton@tus.ie