Customer trust recovery: An alternative explanation

Abstract

The importance of trust and the prevalence of organizational trust transgressions have led to a growing number of studies investigating trust recovery. The extant literature is characterized as being almost entirely trust violator-centric, involving trust violator-centric explanations of trust recovery. Given the importance of both the trustee and trustor in the trust relationship, we ask: How does trust recovery work when the process is considered from the trustors' perspective? Using grounded theory methodology involving customers who experienced trust recovery in an organization, we find that customers’ trust recovery starts with their observation of initial trust repair activities, which helps them in their sensemaking about the organizational transgression. After this, trust recovery becomes a more trustor-driven process, involving perceived personal harm and forgetting the trust violation. This study contributes to extant theory and practice. First, it extends the extant literature by identifying forgetting as an important explanatory concept in the customer trust recovery process. Second, it shows that trust recovery is a complex process involving tensions and requiring a balancing act. Third, the study shows that approaching the trust recovery phenomenon from a non-trustee perspective holds potential for significant theory development about trust recovery.