Trusting as a ‘Leap of Faith’: Trust-building practices in client–consultant relationships

Highlights

• Based on a sample of 15 clients and 16 consultants in Australia, we develop a grounded model that explains the process of trust granting in the context of client–consultant relationships.

• We suggest that trusting in client–consultant relationships involves three social practices—(1) signaling ability and integrity, (2) clarifying process and outcome expectations to demonstrate benevolence, and (3) demonstrating likability and personal fit in order to establish an affective connection.

• We advance a process approach to trust as a leap of faith resulting from socio-cognitive (-emotional) interactions and move away from the passive evaluation of trustworthiness.

Summary

Successful client–consultant relationships depend on trust, but trusting is difficult in the non-routine, high-stake context of consulting. Based on a sample of 15 clients and 16 consultants in Australia, we develop a grounded model that explains the process of trust granting in the context of client–consultant relationships. Our model builds upon two influential research streams on trust in the literature, the ABI model (Mayer et al., 1995. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734) and Zucker's (1986. Research in Organizational Behavior, 8, 53–111) generic modes of trust, and combines their insights with a process perspective on trusting as proposed by Möllering (2001. Sociology, 35(2), 403–420). By acknowledging the process nature of trust as a leap of faith resulting from socio-cognitive (-emotional) interactions we move away from the passive evaluation of trustworthiness. Our findings suggest that trusting is a process that involves three social practices: (1) signaling ability and integrity; (2) demonstrating benevolence; and (3) establishing an emotional connection. Our study contributes to the trust literature on consulting and to trust research more generally by advancing a process approach and emphasizing the social, not merely mental, nature of trusting as involving a leap of faith.

Introduction

Trust is “essential to commercial transactions that are not fully controlled by either legal constraints of contracts or the economic forces of markets” (Oakes, 1990: 674). Consulting services are a good example of such transactions because they are characterized by high ambiguity, complexity and interdependency of actors engaged in the production and consumption of the service. Building trust in client–consultant relationships is challenging because the high institutional uncertainty of the consulting market, meaning that there is no professional certification and accreditation of consultants, increases clients’ uncertainty und vulnerability when choosing consultants (Glückler & Armbrüster, 2003). Understanding how trust develops in client–consultant relationships can therefore provide important insights toward understanding trust granting in complex and ambiguous business-to-business relationships.

Although some research on trust building in client–consultant relationships exists, important gaps remain. Currently, there is limited research in the consulting literature on how clients and consultants can build trust, i.e. the actual practices they engage in. For instance, according to Glückler and Armbrüster (2003) trust in client–consultant relationships is based either on market reputation, direct client experience or is communicated through a network of trusting acquaintances. Others explore the antecedents for developing trust in client–consultant relationships, such as the consultant's credibility, reputation, experience and capacity for caring (Joni, 2005, May, 2004, Robinson and Robinson, 2006), which is in line with the generic ‘ABI’ model of perceived trustworthiness dimensions. This research suggests that trust is based on the perception of ability, benevolence and integrity (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995).

However, little is known how clients and consultants actually create and maintain trusting relations and how they try to actively enhance perceptions of trustworthiness. It is the aim of this study to give answers to these questions. Prior conceptual work on the leap of faith in trust (see Möllering, 2001) looks beyond indicators of trustworthiness and suggests a process perspective on trusting in the face of vulnerability and uncertainty. Our study adopts this theoretical stance and makes two contributions. First, we develop a grounded model based on an empirical study of clients and consultants in Australia, which explains clients’ and consultants’ perceptions of the process of granting trust to consultants. We focus on clients’ and consultants’ reflections on the selection process of consultants and the role of social interaction in this process. Our study shows that the creation of trust is constituted by three social practices: (1) signaling ability and integrity; (2) demonstrating benevolence; and (3) establishing an emotional connection. This entails not just the clients’ detached perception but the co-creation of cognitive and affective trust bases for the relationship (Beckert, 2006). Second, by emphasizing client–consultant interaction our findings also contribute to the general debate in the trust literature that calls for a process approach to trust (Möllering, 2013, Nooteboom, 2002) and extends earlier work on the element of suspension in trust by showing the ongoing social practices that support positive expectations and the leap of faith in client–consultant relationships (see also Näslund, 2012).

The paper is organized as follows: first, we develop our theoretical framework. We review existing research on trust, how it has been reflected in consulting literature, and outline shortcomings of existing research followed by the discussion of a process perspective on trust as our theoretical framework. In the next section, we describe our research design and present the main findings of our study. Based on insights from the literature and on our empirical research, we develop a conceptual framework of three trust–building practices. We conclude the paper by summarizing our main findings and outlining directions for future research.