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How managers can build trust in strategic alliances: a meta-analysis on the central trust-building mechanisms

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Abstract

Trust is an important driver of superior alliance performance. Alliance managers are influential in this regard because trust requires active involvement, commitment and the dedicated support of the key actors involved in the strategic alliance. Despite the importance of trust for explaining alliance performance, little effort has been made to systematically investigate the mechanisms that managers can use to purposefully create trust in strategic alliances. We use Parkhe’s (J World Bus 33:417–437, 1998b) theoretical framework to derive nine hypotheses that distinguish between process-based, characteristic-based and institutional-based trust-building mechanisms. Our meta-analysis of 64 empirical studies shows that trust is strongly related to alliance performance. Process-based mechanisms are more important for building trust than characteristic- and institutional-based mechanisms. The effects of prior ties and asset specificity are not as strong as expected and the impact of safeguards on trust is not well understood. Overall, theoretical trust research has outpaced empirical research by far and promising opportunities for future empirical research exist.

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Notes

  1. The formation of FINT—First International Network of Research on Trust—and the infusion of trust as an important topic in influential research associations, such as AOM, EGOS or EURAM, are cases in point.

  2. We used the following search terms to construct search strings: alliance*, joint ventur*, relational capabilit*, relational capital, relationship capital, social capital, social exchange*, tie strength*, and trust* (where the asterisk allows for any variations in the ending of the word). Examples are: [alliance* AND trust*], [joint venture* AND relational capability*], [alliance* AND social capital].

  3. The definition of strategic alliances provided in the introduction implies factors that promote trust from the outset of the relationship. Thus, on average, the level of trust prevailing in the alliances referred to by the studies included in our sample might be higher than in interorganizational relationships in general. This circumstance might lead to correlations that would still be higher, even if a sample of studies drawing on interorganizational relationships with more variation in trust was selected and compared to the findings of our meta-analysis. We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to our attention.

  4. In order to shed more light on this non-finding, we dug deeper into the measurement of similarity of societal culture in the underlying studies in an exploratory way and normalized the scales of the studies that examine cultural similarity or cultural distance, respectively. The overall sample-weighted average of the normalized means for cultural similarity was 0.7258. It shows that about three quarters of the analyzed alliances were from similar or the same societal cultures, as opposed to only the remaining quarter of alliances with partners from different and distant cultures. This indicates a selection bias in the underlying studies. The result suggests that companies willing to form an alliance mainly choose partners with a similar cultural background.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, School of Business and Economics, Freie Universität Berlin, Garystr. 21, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Matthias Meier, Martina Lütkewitte & Thomas Mellewigt

  2. Faculty 7: Business Studies and Economics, University of Bremen, Wilhelm-Herbst-Str. 5, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Carolin Decker

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  1. Matthias Meier
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Correspondence to Carolin Decker.

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Table 3 Meta-analytic results of the antecedents to and the performance implications of trust in strategic alliances without corrections for outliers and publication bias
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Meier, M., Lütkewitte, M., Mellewigt, T. et al. How managers can build trust in strategic alliances: a meta-analysis on the central trust-building mechanisms. J Bus Econ 86, 229–257 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11573-015-0777-1

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