Paper info

Building Organizational Trust

Kirsimarja Blomqvist and Pirjo Ståhle

The paper was published at the 16th IMP-conference in Bath, U.K in 2000.

In this paper we study the role of trust in enhancing asymmetric partnership formation. Firstwe briefly review the role of trust. Then we analyze the state-of-the-art of the theoretical andempirical literature on trust creation and antecedents for experienced trustworthiness. As aresult of the literature review and our knowledge of the context in praxis, we create a modelon organizational trust building where the interplay of inter-organizational and inter-personaltrust is scrutinized. Potential challenges for our model are first the asymmetry oforganizations and actors and secondly the volatility of the business. The opportunity windowfor partnering firms may be very short i.e. there is not much time for natural development oftrust based on incremental investments and social or character similarity, but so called ?fast?or 'swift? trust is needed. As a managerial contribution we suggest some practices andprocesses, which could be used for organizational trust building. These are developed fromthe viewpoint of large organization boundary-spanners (partner/vendor managers) developingasymmetric technology partnerships.