Inter-organisational relationship trust repair: a ranked Delphi study with UK professionals

• Author: Benjamin James Crossley
• Position: Aptare Consulting Ltd, Manchester, UK
• Pages: 195-213

Inter-organisational relationship

trust repair: a ranked Delphi

study with UK professionals

Benjamin James Crossley

Aptare Consulting Ltd, Manchester, UK

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide practical knowledge on how to repair trust within

inter-organisational relationships (IORs), and to compare that knowledge to present academic research.

IORs have an alarming failure rate upwards of 60 per cent. Although the breakdown of trust is a

well-documented critical component of their failure, specic research on IOR trust repair is limited.

Design/methodology/approach – The research applied a ranked Delphi study utilising UK

professionals’ expertise in IOR management.

Findings – The results provide two practical frameworks and several new methods for IOR trust

repair; furthermore, they demonstrate consistency between professionally adopted IOR trust repair

methods and those proposed academically.

Research limitations/implications – The study’s primary limitations resulted from being

conducted at the lower end of its operating window, and only with panellists interested in trust repair.

The implications for research are to direct investigations to the new IOR trust repair methods and to test

when professionals would undertake trust repair methods.

Practical implications – The IOR trust repair frameworks can be utilised retrospectively as a tool

kit to repair damaged relationships. Additionally, they can be proactively embedded in IOR contract

documentation, whereby parties agree to enact and abide by the frameworks, should relations

deteriorate, before proceeding down legal avenues.

Originality/value – This paper offers the rst contribution from the UK professional community on

IOR trust repair; they have provided new research areas for academics as well as practicable, pertinent

frameworks for professionals.

Keywords Trust, Conict resolution, Delphi study, Inter organisational relationships,

Partnerships and alliances, Trust repair

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

“Trust is the glue of life” (Covey, 2006, p. 118), an intrinsic part of all relationships, be

they business or social. The repair of trust, following a violation, is therefore critical to

the relationship’s longevity. However, trust repair in relation to inter-organisational

relationships (IORs) such as alliances, partnerships and joint ventures (JVs) is limited

(Janowicz-Panjaitan and Krishnan, 2009). IORs are important corporate tools providing

strategic benets around time, risk, capital investment (Bonaccorsi and Lipparini, 1994;

Dussauge and Garrette, 1999), market penetration (Agarwal and Ramaswami, 1992),

The author would like to thank the anonymous panel for their time, expertise and participation in

the study. Further thanks go to the anonymous reviewers of the paper for their suggestions and

guidance.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/1756-1450.htm

Inter-

organisational

relationship

trust

195

Received 31 August 2014

Revised 1 December 2014

Accepted 14 January 2015

InternationalJournal of Law in the

BuiltEnvironment

Vol.7 No. 3, 2015

pp.195-213

©Emerald Group Publishing Limited

1756-1450

DOI 10.1108/IJLBE-08-2014-0024

market share, skills and knowledge acquisition (Doz and Hamel, 1998) and competitive

advantage (Child et al., 2005). As such, they have been growing in use over the past 20

years in line with globalisation (Spekman et al., 2012;Dussauge and Garrette, 1999).

Despite increasing use of IORs and the motivation to make them work, they still suffer

from a failure rate of 60-70 per cent (KPMG Alliances, 1996, cited in Draulans et al., 2003,

p. 151; Spekman et al., 1996), with 52 per cent of the failed partnerships being

attributable to damaged relationship trust (Ertel et al., 2001, cited in Eaves et al., 2003,

p. 1). When IORs do fail, all parties lose one or more of the aforementioned benets plus

incur additional costs in time and money. Thus, successfully being able to repair

damaged relationship trust will save businesses both time and money, as well as

allowing them to prosper through successful reaping of the IORs’ associated benets.

Previous research has differentiated trust repair into two levels: individual and

organisational. Repairing of relationship trust at the individual level was focused on

initially (Kim et al., 2013), with the organisational level (Dirks et al., 2009;Brodt and

Neville, 2013;Kim et al., 2013;Woolthuis et al., 2010) and how trust transfers between

each level (Schilke and Cook, 2013;Vlaar et al., 2007) both receiving more academic

attention in more recent times. Research further focused on the effect of the type of

response, and whether it is delivered to a group or an individual following a violation

(Kim et al., 2013,2006). This research provides a sound academic background but does

not account for the added complexities that arise from working across corporate

boundaries in IORs. Furthermore, the area is missing input from the professional

community with regard to the practical methods which IOR professionals use to

approach trust repair. Additional research has developed frameworks to aid in trust

repair, at the individual level (Lewicki and Bunker, 1996) and at the organisational level

(Eaves et al., 2003). These frameworks do not, however, provide much with regards to

specic methods of trust repair that could be used and, furthermore, do not utilise the

knowledge of the professional community.

Through introducing the professional community’s practical knowledge and

expertise, this research aims to provide practicable methods and frameworks for the

repair of IOR trust, to aid other IOR professionals and to provide a comparison to

academia.

This paper consists of ve further sections. Firstly, the present literature is reviewed

and the paper’s objectives presented. Following this, the research methodology and

statistical analysis are outlined. Then, the results are presented. Next, a discussion and

summary of the ndings are provided. The paper concludes with the limitations of the

study and the implications for professionals and academics.

To ensure clarity and consistency, for the purpose of this paper, trust shall be dened

as the belief or condence in others, that they will not exploit your vulnerability and

instead act in your best interests (Ward and Smith, 2003;Noteboom et al., 1997;

Luhmann, 1979), whereby “others” can be individuals, groups or organisations. The

characterisation of trust is not the focus of this research; for trust classication analysis,

see Castaldo et al. (2010).

2. Previous research and theories

Trust within IORs can be segregated into two distinct levels: individual and

organisational; the majority of research has mainly focused on trust within one of these

levels (Schilke and Cook, 2013). These two levels dene three general forms of trust

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