7. Gaps and Missteps of Current Research
Multinational firms must seek to understand the antecedents and sources of trust, the context in which it develops, and how trust within a dyad changes over time. While ethical and compliant behavior may be building blocks necessary for building a foundation of trust, they are not enough to ensure trust at the dyadic level. Despite the importance of multinational firms understanding these concepts, there are significant gaps within the literature assessing them. Nevertheless, strides have been made since scholars have started to assess trust as an emergent dyad and not solely as mutual when looking at trust in interorganizational exchanges.
7.1 Flaws Within Available Literature on the Various Approaches
Trust is not understood at the dyadic level, and if it were understood better, then better relationships between multinational companies would develop at a faster speed and with more partners. In reading on the subject of dyadic trust, we discovered that there are three different components of dyadic trust: cognitive, affective, and intentional. Acknowledging these components is important to the understanding of trust because they lay a foundation for the ways that trust is initially established. Another discovery were the three kinds of dyadic trust – two of which are not as understood as the other: mutual and asymmetric (in comparison to reciprocal). The points in time at which companies trust each other cannot be quantified or measured in a formulaic manner that everyone can follow as a guideline, which is quite important for the furthering of the comprehension of dyadic trust. We found this topic quite important and relevant to the business world, but also to our personal lives. In the business world, it is incredibly valuable to be trusting and trustworthy; trust is what can keep a company going. It is also important to be able to trust and be trustworthy as an individual so that it can be used in one’s personal life and work life. In the future, more research should be done in regards to mutual and asymmetric trust, as those are the types of trust that have the least supported results and the ones that businesses have the most to learn from. Some more experiments can be conducted on the dyadic level rather than the individual level. Another thing that could be done to gain more knowledge on trust is for companies to look into themselves and other companies and be “completely transparent”. In doing this, there could be a way to grasp what it is that makes people trust, what makes them trustworthy, the differences in how