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Coping with dark side of trust in business-to-business relationships

Grzegorz Leszczynski and Marek Zielinski

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The researchers emphasize trust as a fundamental concept characterizing most relationships on interpersonal and inter-organizational level. Agreeing with the undoubtedly positive aspects of trust in business-to-business relationships, in this paper we assume that such a picture of trust is biased towards optimism. Trust can be problematic for one or both sides of the business relationship. The dark side of trust, and coping with it remains a research gap, as the negative aspects of trust were taken up only by individual researchers. Assuming that companies aim at high trust in many business relationships, in this paper we aim at proposing research questions regarding how they cope with the negative aspects associated with a high trust. This paper has a conceptual character, it is based on critical literature review. It contributes to the of the IMP approach by problematizing the dysfunction of high trust in terms of individual and organizational business relationships.