Abstract
Trust and distrust are two distinct organizing principles that play a critical role in interorganizational projects where highly interdependent organizations collaborate to build tailor-made and technologically complex solutions. Whereas an emerging body of research has debated the conceptual distinction between trust and distrust, this paper emphasizes the processual nature of trusting and distrusting and the interplay between them. Drawing upon insights from project-based collaboration in a complex products and systems industry, we explore the distinct cognitive and behavioral mechanisms through which trust and distrust work and orient firms towards optimism and watchfulness in the interaction. Our findings show that trust and distrust can act both as substitutes and complements through three interconnected dynamics—undermining, enabling, and compensating. These dynamics develop and recursively interrelate through interfirm interactions within single projects and in the broader network. We conclude by presenting our contributions to interorganizational trust literature and by proposing that the interplay of trust and distrust can have both positive and negative effects on the pursuit of project-based relationships.
Highlights
In this article, we explore the workings of, and interplay between, trust and distrust as two distinct organizing principles that guide how firms interpret information, select appropriate behaviors, and coordinate actions in interorganizational interactions
This paper aims to increase the understanding of the mechanisms through which trust and distrust work as distinct organizing principles and the dynamics of the interplay between them in the context of project-based collaboration in a complex products and systems (CoPS) industry
While temporary alignments allow flexible and task-specific allocations of complementary resources contained in a CoPS industry, project-based collaborations are challenging in this context
Summary
We explore the workings of, and interplay between, trust and distrust as two distinct organizing principles that guide how firms interpret information, select appropriate behaviors, and coordinate actions in interorganizational interactions (see McEvily, Perrone, & Zaheer, 2003). We suggest that distrust plays a critical role in potentially diminishing undesirable consequences of trust by highlighting negative potentialities. This role corresponds with an emerging body of literature that views distrust as distinct from trust and as beneficial in organizing uncertain interactions (Guo, Lumineau, & Lewicki, 2017; Lewicki, McAllister, & Bies, 1998; Luhmann, 1979). Little is known about how trust and distrust interrelate and influence each other
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