Earning Trust Through Change

A Level 3–4 leadership and organizational-behaviour simulation set at Lusitânia Logística SA, a Portuguese third-party logistics operator in Porto (EUR 240M revenue, 6% EBIT margin = EUR 14.4M, 2,600 staff at six sites, four unionized). Eight months ago the previous management announced then quietly cancelled a profit-share scheme; the trust-in-leadership index now sits at 38/100 (healthy benchmark ~65). Playing the leadership team, you must roll out a genuinely unpopular but necessary change — a new shift system and warehouse automation backed by a EUR 30M client commitment that affects ~180 of 1,900 operational roles — operational by the 30 September 2026 board deadline or two clients (40% of revenue) cut volume. Over four rounds you: (1) diagnose which component of trust (ability, benevolence, integrity) the broken profit-share promise damaged most, and how deeply you investigate before acting; (2) choose the communication framing (full transparency up front, a gains-first phased message, or a co-created approach that brings the union in before announcing), decide whether to acknowledge the cancelled profit-share, and set how honest your promise is versus over-promising 'no job losses'; (3) select leader behaviours and one costly, verifiable trust-repair move — a binding no-compulsory-redundancy guarantee with a penalty, leaders visibly absorbing a cost, a worker-elected redeployment oversight committee, reinstating a scaled profit-share tied to success, or relying on words alone — and fund it against the thin EUR 14.4M EBIT reality; and (4) respond in real time when a viral internal post accuses leadership of 'doing it again' and the strike ballot lands, defending the rollout to both the board and the works council. The engine prices every choice into four scored indices — Trust Index (0–100), Change Adoption (%), Perceived Ethicality (0–100), and Turnover Risk (0–100, lower is better) — plus a financial impact in EUR M against the deadline. Wrong strategies underperform on purpose: a gains-first message that buries the 180 affected roles reads as spin to a cynical workforce; over-promising no job losses risks a second broken promise that drops trust toward zero and spikes turnover among the people you must keep; communication with no costly repair move spends the one currency already devalued by the profit-share; a top-down announcement that ignores the union triggers the live strike ballot and breaks the very SLAs you are racing to protect; and never acknowledging the cancelled profit-share leaves the violation poisoning every message. Built on Pedro Neves's research on ethical leadership, organizational trust and the psychological contract, plus Mayer-Davis-Schoorman's components of trust, Rousseau and Dirks on trust repair, Kotter and the change curve, and procedural/interactional justice. Teaches that in change, how leaders behave and whether they are perceived as ethical matters more than the message — and that a violated psychological contract must be actively, verifiably repaired, not talked away.