INITIAL TRUST IN CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATIONS: FORMAL AND INFORMAL ASSURANCES IN CANADA AND JAPAN.

This article presents a study that examined the development of inter-organizational trust at the beginning of a cross-cultural alliance for trustors from Canada and Japan. Trust is a critical factor in alliance formation and management. At the beginning of the collaboration, partners have insufficient background information about one another to form trusting beliefs and intentions. Thus, initial trust is fragile. While first impressions and preliminary interactions can provide essential opportunities for developing initial trust, in cross-cultural collaborations differences in expectations and interaction styles, language barriers and geographical distance raise significant obstacles to trust building. The study found strong support for the hypothesized link between formal assurances and trusting outcomes in Canada and for the hypothesized link between informal assurances and trusting outcomes in Japan. The types of assurances that serve as effective signals of credibility and trustworthiness for trustors from different cultures may indicate which types of trust-building processes are more characteristic within that culture. As a practical implication, being sensitive to which cues trustors from different cultures pay most attention to in their assessment of the trustee can increase the trustee's odds of receiving a favorable initial evaluation, thus contributing to a higher level of trust from the very beginning of the alliance.