Organizationally-aligned incentives make state agents untrustworthy to their clients

Evidence

The distrust of the Russian state agencies that oversaw the economy during its woeful years includes, rightly, distrust of many of the officers of those agencies. To give them proper incentives for behaving constructively might require massive organizational redesign. As is commonly true, they seem to have come to view their interests as tied to the interests of their organization rather than to the interests of their clientele. This can happen simply because it is within the organization that they are rewarded, so that it is their organization and not their clientele who give them their incentives for action or inaction. This problem is exacerbated when there is the credible threat that some of these institutions will be abolished. Hence I cannot trust the agents—because I believe their interests do not encapsulate mine. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 767

Categorization

• XREF: Directly formalizes the reader’s stated mechanism: trust requires observable constraints on opportunistic behavior; here the observable constraint (reward) is aligned against the client, predicting betrayal. — connects to: Organizational incentives silence dissent inside firms riding unsustainable leverage — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 900; Poor clients’ agency involvement is nonvoluntary when no real alternatives exist; Target-driven reform rewards bureaucrats while distrust of frontline workers degrades services — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1395 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Operationalizes ‘interests do not encapsulate mine’ — the precise condition under which Hardin says trust is rationally withheld.