On establishing trustworthy inter-organisational collaboration

Abstract

Trust is not a single concept that can uniformly be applied to all cases for trust-based decision-making and its measurement depends on actors’ perception and thus can never be measured with the single criterion. Developing fact-based mechanisms for assessing the level of trust in organisations is amenable to large collaborative networks, in which some members do not know each other. This article presents a conceptual model in terms of mathematical equations for supporting trust analysis in organisations. The model, and thus its related mechanisms for assessing the level of trust in an organisation comprise trust criteria, known factors and intermediate factors. The paper also presents a model for assessing trustworthiness of organisations based on mathematical equations formulated applying systems engineering and system thinking concepts. It concludes by presenting the implementation and functionalities of a trust management system.