The thinking goes that extending trust makes people relax, while holding a hard line on accountability can inhibit the experimentation that innovation requires. This belief is common among entrepreneurs in the growth phase of their business, but it is a misconception.
Breuer et al., in a meta-analysis of over 12,000 professionals across 1,850 teams, found that trust remained positively linked to team effectiveness even when interactions were formally documented and tracked, and that the relationship held whether teams worked face-to-face or at a distance.
Thinking of trust and accountability as trade-offs misses essential nuance; in fact, they are mutually reinforcing conditions for performance and decoupling them risks compromising both.
The confusion usually starts with a mislabelling of fear. When entrepreneurs in the growth phase of a business feel uncertain about outcomes, they often respond by increasing oversight: more approvals, more check-ins, more ‘just verifying.’
These behaviours might feel like accountability, but they actually emerge as reactions to fear and anxiety rather than a genuine standard-setting practice. Over time, team members notice the difference.
As people sense they are not fully trusted, they become more cautious, less open, and ultimately less trustworthy in appearance. This, in turn, justifies even tighter control and verification, locking the organisation into a cycle of mistrust and vigilance.
The empirical picture is consistent. De Jong et al. confirmed that intra-team trust carries an above-average, positive relationship with team performance, and that the relationship strengthens as tasks become more interdependent.
Dirks and Ferrin, in a meta-analysis of four decades of leadership research, found that trust in a direct leader predicts task performance and discretionary ‘extra-mile’ effort at least as strongly as trust in senior leadership.
Neither study found evidence that high trust correlates with lower standards. If anything, trust and high standards are correlated: teams that trust each other surface problems earlier, which allows standards to be maintained under pressure rather than discovered as failures after the fact.
Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, whose seminal work established psychological safety as a distinct, measurable team property, has long argued that safety and standards are independent variables, not competing ones.
A team can be safe and undemanding, which fosters comfort without growth; in contrast, demanding and unsafe produces anxiety without honesty. Ideally, when teams are both safe and demanding, a state she describes as the ‘learning zone’, people take risks, experiment with new possibilities, surface mistakes early, and hold each other to high standards because they trust feedback is offered in good faith.
From this perspective, building trust is not lowering standards; it is building an environment where people can tell the truth about whether the standards they aspire to are being met.
Long and Sitkin found that certain forms of control, particularly those that signal suspicion rather than support, consistently erode trust and can undermine the very compliance they are intended to cultivate.
This matters for accountability, because leaders who default to control when standards slip are often trading a short-term sense of certainty for a longer-term loss of the openness that enables teams to test new ideas and catch problems while they are still small.
The research points to a different lever: practices to cultivate accountability that are transparent and consistently applied, paired with real relational investment, tend to outperform approaches built primarily on surveillance.
Building trust without diluting standards is less about a single conversation and more about consistently modelling desired behaviours. Entrepreneurs can:
- Name the standard explicitly, rather than leaving it implied, so accountability has a clear reference point instead of becoming personal or arbitrary.
- Close the loop on decisions by explaining what was decided and why, so people are not left to fill gaps with projection or suspicion.
- Own mistakes first and visibly, which signals that honesty and openness are prioritised even when the news is difficult to hear.
- Separate feedback conversations from surveillance. Ask before assuming and address performance gaps directly rather than through indirect monitoring.
- Treat a missed standard as a shared problem to solve and to learn from, not only an individual failing to reprimand.
Trust and accountability have never been mutually exclusive. Entrepreneurs who build both, deliberately and consistently, enable teams to maintain high standards not because they are being watched, but because they choose to.
- Errol Amerasekera, author of From Fear to Flow: The Adaptive Safety Revolution (Busybird Publishing AUD $36), is the owner of Bluestone Edge, a consultancy that supports organisations with the complexities of leadership, culture, performance, and inclusion.
