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This article examines the interrelationships among employee trust in the chief executive of the organization, trust in the organization and work satisfaction. These three concepts capture the essential experience of the employee's work life, but their interrelationships have been more often a subject for speculation than for research. Employees in one government organization and one manufacturing firm offered their visions of critical features in managerial trust and organizational trust. With respect to defining chief executive trust, employees emphasized the manager's employee orientation, honesty, ability, fairness and forthrightness. Critical features that employees used to define organizational trust included the social significance of organizational mission, quality of output, and the organization's persistence beyond the human lifespan. Trust in the chief executive and organizational trust were found to be uncorrelated with one another, as expected from the conceptual review. Instead, these variables were conceptually linked through their individual relationships with employee work satisfaction.

Particularly since the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there has been renewed interest in emergency planning in both the private and public sectors. Government emergency planning tends to be conducted by specialized agencies and offices, such as fire departments, police departments or emergency management. Traditionally, most of this planning is oriented toward protecting the public and public structures. Selectively over the decades, some of this planning was oriented toward insuring that government could continue to function following a disaster. At the federal level during the Cold War, much attention was given to the problem of post-nuclear attack government functioning under the rubric of "government continuity." In the past decade, private sector businesses have begun to plan for business continuity following a variety of disasters including terrorist attacks. In spite of sporadic research indicating that local governments are particularly vulnerable, little attention has been paid to planning for government continuity following disasters or terrorism. This paper reviews the literature on historic disasters and terrorist events to establish the level of danger faced by local government. Then six key planning measures for insuring post-emergency operations are reviewed. Data are presented from a large southwestern U.S. city on levels of municipal department emergency preparedness. The paper closes with a discussion of how human resources departments may be mobilized to make critical and unique contributions to local government preparations for terrorism and disasters.

Employee trust is an integral part of the organizational behavior lexicon, but professional use seems to employ different referents for the trust invested. The goal here is to focus on a specific referent for trust — managers — and examine the extent to which trust varies among different levels of management. The data analyzed come from a larger study of two organizations, a large municipal fire department and a private manufacturing company. Three classes of variables are tested as a model of antecedent correlates of managerial trust: characteristics of the trustee (gender, ethnicity, years worked under the manager), characteristics of the organization (layoffs, managerial turnover), and characteristics of the manager (technical expertise and credibility). Although there were differences by manager (supervisor vs. CEO) and between the organizations, regression analyses indicate that overall the model fits the data well.

"September 11, 2001, changed the world" has been repeated many times. The U.S. government, too, has changed immensely and will continue to evolve a security conscience and response capacity for years to come. This article addresses the situation from the standpoint of human resource management. We use public opinion poll data to document the changing opinions of individuals and changes in the environment in which public organizations operate. The literature on human response to natural and technological disasters is reviewed to glean information on how people respond to extreme levels of stress. This information is systematized and extrapolated to arrive at a series of behaviors that can be reasonably expected from employees exposed to terrorist incidents. Finally, the discussion closes with an examination of the Employee Assistance Program as locus of expertise for mitigating problematic employee reactions to terrorist incidents.