TRUST

There are many suggestions from previous research for establishing and understanding the meaning of trust in a business relationship. Giddens (1990) relates trust to lack of visibility between the parties. He states

Trust is related to absence in time and space. There would be no need to trust anyone, neither individuals nor abstract systems, if their activities were visible and easy to understand. So the prime condition for lack of trust is lack of full information (p. 33).

Choo (2006) identifies trust to be a

….psychological state expressed as the willingness to be vulnerable under conditions of risk and interdependence. Trust is not a behaviour (such as cooperation) or a choice (such as taking a risk), but an underlying psychological condition that can cause or result from such actions (p. 193).

In a business environment, Hurley (2006, p. 56) views trust as a relational concept and says trust is a measure of the quality of a relationship between two parties, as “when people choose to trust, they have gone through a decision-making process – one involving factors that can be identified, analysed, and influenced”. Their decision making is influenced by the fact that individuals are basically tribal and self-centred, and so find it easier to trust those who appear similar to themselves, as they can be counted on to act similarly in a given situation. People tend to tally up similarities and differences such as working style, cultural groups, accents, dress code, or even gender within their local visible spaces, before they begin to trust the other party. This has been termed in an earlier study as trustworthiness, which is a belief that comes before trust and is an intention or willingness to depend on another party (McKnight, Cummings, & Chervany, 1998).

Thus, according to Hurley, trust is dependent on both the parties – truster and trustee – in a business relationship, where similarities in their cultural groupings and working styles lead to a feeling of ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘willingness to be vulnerable’ under conditions of risk and interdependence. Hurley proposes a trust model in which he identifies ten key factors to guide parties for decision making about who to trust and who not to trust in a business relationship. Three decision maker factors of trust are associated with the truster, while seven situational factors are associated with the relationship between truster and trustee (see Table 11). Hurley encourages researchers to apply his decision making trust model to inter-

Table 11 Trust model

Decision- Maker Factors

Low

1. How risk tolerant is the truster? 2. How well-adjusted is the truster?

3. How much relative power does the truster have?

High

Situational Factors

Low

4. How secure do the parties feel?

5. How similar are the parties?

6. How well aligned are the parties interests? 7. Does the trustee show benevolent concern? 8. Is the trustee capable?

9. Has the trustee shown predictability and integrity? 10. Do the parties have good communication?

High

Choice DISTRUST TRUST

Source: Hurley 2006

Based upon previous definitions of trust available in the literature, this study defines trust in a business environment as “the process of accommodating a shared understanding of socio-cultural differences across client-vendor relationships for a larger professional cause”. The shared understanding is based upon multidimensional conditions such as interdependence, where interests of one party cannot be achieved without reliance on another, perceptions of each other’s cultural and societal structures, and feeling of vulnerability due to lack of visibility of each other’s actions. Though lack of visibility across geographical boundaries cannot be avoided, some transparency in information can be brought about by engagement and relationship philosophy and good relationship management skills (Moore & Martorelli, 2004). Organisations try to increase transparency of their geographically dispersed operations by using tools that facilitate sharing of information and artefacts in the shared virtual space. These tools help in building trust among the geographically dispersed members as, over time, these tools transform faceless commitments into scripted tasks or facework commitments (Sharma & Krishna, 2005). Virtual teams that use more social communication achieve higher mutual trust and better social and emotional relationships (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Robey, Khoo, & Powers, 2000).

Another factor for building trust is the reputation of the parties involved. Reputation promotes cooperation by enhancing the probability of carrying out promises, though

reputation, being a publicly held opinion, is more ambiguous than trust and is open to manipulation and stereotyping (Misztal, 1996).

Trust has also been described to have “a highly situational context” where levels of trust perception “changes with time and level of communication, and the change may not be necessarily direct and linear. Contextualised views of organisational settings will help to better understand how trust effects operate in IT-enabled relationships” (Jarvenpaa et al., 2004, p. 262). From an IT perspective, Jarvenpaa et al. (2004) emphasise that technology changes the context of trust in human relationships, and, suggest the application of different theoretical models for the study of trust in global virtual teams. For virtual teams, trust is contextual and depends upon both organisational structures and time. Their view is that “time is important because it is a critical part of the context” resulting in different managerial interventions leading to changes in organisational structure (p. 262). They argue that in structured organisational settings, trust has an initially weak direct effect on attitudes as people refer to their own pre-existing psychological dispositions, but as the settings attain more structure, trust has a moderating effect on attitudes and performance, as people revise their understanding of each other’s motives. This is also in agreement with ST, as when situations are re-defined and re-exported in different social contexts, the reflexivity of human opinions brings in a moderating influence on their attitudes.