A Cultural Perspective on the Emergence of Organizational Trust

Cultural factors play an important role in the dynamics of trust within a society, among all its diverse members, both individuals and organizations. Cultural diversity can be both an impediment as well as a catalyst to productive trust-based relationships between social actors. In this chapter, we present the theoretical framework that explains the development of inter-organizational trust in industrial clusters, its main stages, barriers and managerial factors behind trust development. The framework serves as the basis for empirical research that covered 109 professional cluster facilitators from 37 countries. We present the key aspects of the emergence of inter-firm trust by incorporating an analysis of multi-level factors of trust development in three different geographical and cultural contexts: Northwestern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Europe/Latin America. This research has revealed the different challenges of trust dynamics depending on such aspects of cultural environment as the approach to authority, rules and group relations. The chapter argues for the need to adopt a non-linear approach to trust development in order to embrace the complexity of the modern organizational environment.