Trust as Intangible Asset ‑ Enabling Intellectual Capital Development by Leadership for Vitality and Innovativeness

Abstract

Abstract: Trust has become an essential intangible asset in organizations and leadership. Trust promotes social order and cooperation in workplace relationships. It is a resource that creates vitality and enables innovativeness. The paper discusses and examines the highly timely topic of trust from the human intellectual capital (HIC) perspective. More specifically, the focus is on the role trust plays in renewing intellectual capital by leadership. In the paper, trust is viewed in a relational context describing the positive expectations of a respectful human behaviour. Originality of the paper is based on the two ideas of both theoretical and practical significance. First, exploring and conceptualizing trust as intangible asset, resource and skill in organizations. Second, examining how trust in leadership enables HIC development and how it affects. The paper provides a novel view into managing intangibles, since trust as intellectual resource and a leadership skill in relation to HIC development have hardly been examined integrated. The main point highlights the importance of leadership by trust in enabling the growth and utilization of HIC. The paper advocates the idea that, in managing knowledge, it is important to increase understanding of the interaction among different aspects of KM. The value intangible assets, such as trust, add to human resource development (HRD) is multiple and still poorly understood. The paper presents also two real life case studies of how leadership by trust enables vitality and innovativeness in organizations. The case studies examine the sharing of tacit knowledge and co‑creation with customers.