An examination of the role of trust and its interaction with the contextual factors on the relational management of an it outsourcing project

Abstract

This study investigated the interaction of trust, a core component of relational management, with vendors’ technical capabilities and users’ power-distance-index scores in the relational management of outsourced information technology projects. This is one of the first studies in the information systems literature to acknowledge the critical role played by contextual factors in outsourced information technology projects. Relational management has already been established as a sound governance mechanism; however, not much research has been conducted to determine the environment in which it operates. This study hypothesized that the attributes of certain contextual factors would affect relational management’s efficacy and that relational management would influence the role of contextual factors. In essence, in an outsourced IT project using relational governance mechanism, users’ system-success perceptions were hypothesized to be contingent upon the interplay of relational management and the project’s context. The context was comprised of the technical capability of the vendor measured through CMMI and the power distance cultural values of the user. The results indicated that CMMI did interact with trust in determining users’ system-success perceptions, whereas power-distance values did not interact with trust. This study used a sample of IT professionals with backgrounds in both IT outsourcing and CMMI. Data were collected using an online survey. The study has implications for both academics and practitioners in that IT outsourcing projects do not operate in a vacuum and the surrounding technical and cultural environments can influence users’ perceptions about the likelihood of a project’s success.%%%%Ph.D., Information Science – Drexel University, 2012