Processes and the evolution of trust in interfirm collaborative relationships: A longitudinal study

This dissertation examines multi-level interorganizational processes among supply chain partners. Recently, several theoretical works have called for the need to further our understanding of the processual, behavioral, and psychological aspects of cooperative interorganizational relationship (Ring and Van de Ven, 1994; Zajac and Olsen, 1993; Smith, Carroll and Ashford, 1995). While a handful of studies have addressed some of these aspects (e.g., Larson, 1992; Gulati, 1995a & b; Uzzi, 1995), the field is still in a relatively infancy state with respect to understanding behavioral and psychological processes in interfirm. cooperative relationships. In addition, the literature has not empirically addressed the organizational and human resource issues related to interorganizational relationships. To fill this void in the literature this paper explicitly examines the behavioral and psychological and organizational factors occurring within and between two or more firms. It looks at how these processes influence trust between the partnering organizations and how trust among partnering organizations develop and change over time. It also explores the complexity and dimensionality of trust in these partnerships.; The context of this study consisted of supply chain trading partners in the grocery industry. At the time of this study, there was an industry wide movement called Efficient Consumer Response (ECR). It largely involved transforming the relationships of trading partners from adversarial and arms length to that of a collaborative strategic alliance. This study combines a real-time, longitudinal case study with six retrospective case studies, archival data, and a longitudinal survey to develop a process model of organizational, psychological and behavioral aspects of interfirm cooperation. A total of 44 interviews were conducted as the basis for this largely qualitative research. There were 22 companies and 33 dyadic relationships in the sample representing four types of firms within the grocery industry supply chain—manufacturers, food brokers, wholesalers and retail chains.; The results of a comprehensive comparative and cross-case analysis provided the basis for a proposed process model that describes the key behavioral and psychological and organizational factors the occur in these interfirm relationships. The results also demonstrated that trust was a multi-level, multi-dimensional construct that changed over time.