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Organizations operate in all areas through people and it is their contribution which determines success and it is their skills and knowledge which need to be cultivated and then leveraged to create competitive advantage. Sustainability of this competitive advantage comes from the development of tightly coordinated and complementary activities and directed towards producing a strategy of differentiation and making a unique offering to customers. A consistency in strategic direction is essential and this will necessitate the exercise of choice to develop a unique strategy. The development of sustainable competitive advantage is a vital management function and an important requirement is the nurturing of a knowledge creating environment to enable the organization to exploit and develop resources better than rivals and create sufficient knowledge to address the industry’s future success factors.

This study seeks to examine antecedents of perception of trust as a foundation for extra‐role behaviour in the public sector non‐profit organisations.

A total of 1,600 questionnaires were distributed and 329 questionnaires were returned from five different non‐profit local government authorities in Australia.

It was found that perceptions of trust in management, psychological support, management values and rewards were strong antecedents of employee perceptions, which in turn were positively correlated with employee extra‐role behaviour. Employee participation in decision making and contributions from autonomous employees were strong indicators of extra‐role behaviour, whereas intrinsic job motivation and the sharing of knowledge were found to be weaker indicators of discretionary extra‐role behaviour.

The study was based on the voluntary response of employees of five independent local government authorities in Australia. Thus findings in other geographical or cultural locations may be significantly different. Beyond the questionnaire findings, the relevance to private non‐profit organisations needs to be studied empirically.

The research makes a significant contribution to management of governmental public sector non‐profit organisations which face continuous pressure to develop strategies and embrace management practices that ensure organisational effectiveness.

The findings highlight the important factors that lead to employee perceptions about trust which can lead to discretionary employee efforts in public sector organisations that have great similarity to non‐profit organisations.

CONCLUDING THAT much of the ennui which afflicted me during 1980 must have been due to my forfeiture of the mid‐winter skiing holiday to which I have become accustomed in recent years, I have arranged to be back among the mountains of Austria at the time when this issue of NLW is committed to the mercies of the postal services. (Postage rates having just gone up, do let me know if your copy reaches you earlier than usual — that would be called ‘productivity’!).