Mechanisms and Dynamics in the Interplay of Trust and Distrust: Insights from Project-based Collaboration

Trust and distrust are two distinct organizing principles that play a critical role in interorganizational projects where highly interdependent organizations collaborate to build tailor-made and technologically-complex solutions. Whereas an emerging body of research has debated the conceptual distinction between trust and distrust, this paper emphasizes the processual nature of trusting and distrusting and the interplay between them. Drawing upon insights from project-based collaboration in a complex products and systems (CoPS) industry, we explore the distinct cognitive and behavioral mechanisms through which trust and distrust work, and orient firms towards optimism and watchfulness in the interaction. Our findings show that trust and distrust can act both as substitutes and complements through three interconnected dynamics—undermining, enabling and compensating. These dynamics develop and recursively interrelate through interfirm interactions within single projects and in the broader network. We conclude by presenting our contributions to interorganizational trust literature and by proposing that the interplay of trust and distrust can have both positive and negative effects on the pursuit of project-based relationships.

In Cloud We Trust? Co-opting Occupational Gatekeepers to Produce Normalized Trust in Platform-Mediated Interorganizational Relationships

Interorganizational trust plays an important role in facilitating business relationships, especially for the organizational adoption of new services. Prior research suggests that interorganizational trust develops when the trustor has adequate confidence in the reliability of the trustee’s services. Nevertheless, reliability breakdowns are also an inevitable part of service provisioning. Such breakdowns are especially prominent and visible in the context of platform-based services. Yet platform-based services continue to be adopted and used by organizational customers. This increased adoption and use of such services despite their inconsistent reliability pose the following question. How is trust produced in platform-mediated interorganizational relationships? To examine this question, I conducted a 20-month field study of a cloud computing platform provider and its customers, focusing on the practices of trust production in the wake of reliability breakdowns. Here, I describe customer concerns about the platform’s inconsistent reliability that hampered the development of interorganizational trust. I then identify four practices of trust work enacted by the platform provider to address some of these concerns and to co-opt the occupational gatekeepers in customer organizations who are responsible for technology adoption decisions. Following this, I describe how and why these occupational gatekeepers performed justification work to rationalize the continued use of the platform despite its inconsistent reliability. Together, trust work and justification work facilitate the coproduction of interorganizational trust through normalizing reliability breakdowns as “business-as-usual” events. Synthesizing these findings, I developed a normalization model of trust production, and discuss the implications of normalized trust for platform-mediated interorganizational relationships in the digital economy.

In Cloud We Trust? Coopting Occupational Gatekeepers to Produce Normalized Trust in Platform-mediated Interorganizational Relationships

Interorganizational trust plays an important role in facilitating business relationships, especially for the organizational adoption of new services. Prior research suggests that interorganizational trust develops when the trustor has adequate confidence in the reliability of the trustee’s services. Nevertheless, reliability breakdowns are also an inevitable part of service provisioning. Such breakdowns are especially prominent and visible in the context of platform-based services. Yet, platform-based services continue to be adopted and used by organizational customers. This increased adoption and use of such services despite its inconsistent reliability pose the following question: how is trust produced in platform-mediated interorganizational relationships? To examine this question, I conduct a 20-month field of a cloud computing platform provider and its customers, focusing on the practices of trust production in the wake of reliability breakdowns. I describe customer concerns about the platform’s inconsistent reliability that hampered the development of interorganizational trust. I then identify four practices of trust work enacted by the platform provider to address some of these concerns and to coopt the occupational gatekeepers in customer organizations who are responsible for technology adoption decisions. Following this, I describe how and why these occupational gatekeepers performed justification work to rationalize the continued use of the platform despite its inconsistent reliability. Together, trust work and justification work facilitate the co-production of interorganizational trust through normalizing reliability breakdowns as “business-as-usual” events. Synthesizing these findings, I develop a normalization model of trust production and discuss the implications of normalized trust for platform-mediated interorganizational relationships in the digital economy.

How Canadian High-Performance Coaches Adopt and Implement Technology: Exploring the Antecedents of Intra- and Interorganizational Trust, Technological Proficiency, and Subjective Norms and Social Influence on Technology Adoption

Technological innovation has been shown to make meaningful impacts across several aspects of high-performance sport. Although the literature on technology adoption and implementation is vast, currently very little exists on the coach’s perspective in this regard. This investigation explored Canadian high-performance sport coaches and their relationship with technology adoption. Eleven coaches from both summer and winter National Sport Organizations were interviewed using a semistructured format. Three thematic categories were identified. First, intra- and interorganizational trust showed that coaches valued being aware and informed of any planned changes, and that educating them on technology adoption was important for gaining their participation. Second, coaches mentioned that they took the time to search for and build a fully functional technology, and valued collaboration among their peers for sharing technology-based knowledge. Finally, many of these high-performance coaches also depended upon their relationships to mentor coaches or other coaches in the field to identify and apply new technology. The outcome of this research may provide insight into shaping future policies to help sport coaches get access to the technology that more directly meets their needs.

Factors shaping interorganizational trust in e-commerce based on literature review

SummaryThe article is devoted to identifying external and internal factors that shape inter-organizational trust in e-commerce. Studying how trust between e-commerce partners is built, four key B2B trust spheres were analyzed based on literature. After analyzing thirteen research reports, the factors shaping B2B trust are presented due to their frequency of occurrence in the reports. Research has shown that among the many factors determining B2B trust, the greatest value in interactions between e-commerce partners lies in the factors, i.e.: „common values”, „communication”, „experience and qualifications”.