Buyers' trust and performance assessments of long-standing suppliers: Applying complexity causation and abductive modeling of multiple trust-forms and interfirm relationship-performance outcomes

Abstract

The study here applies complexity causation tenets and uses abductive case-based modeling methods to refine prior theoretical advances in assessing the impacts of alternative configurations of trust-forms (i.e., calculative, cognitive trust, and affective trust (on behavioral trust and buyer firm's assessments of mature-relationship strategy and financial performances as relationship outcomes with a principal supplier. This study supports and deepens Akrout's (2015) configuration that the building of high affective trust drives high interfirm relationship-performance outcomes in the maintenance phase among business buyers and their principal suppliers. The empirical method includes the use of robust measurement scales, assessing the scales psychometric properties, collection of survey data in industrial firms and-to-business firms mostly among senior buyers and additional executives in 140 firms, and analyzing the data in the main study using case-based, asymmetric, complex configurations of antecedent conditions and outcomes. This study contributes useful advances in modeling how trust-forms configurations impact behavioral trust and how customer firms can achieve high strategy/financial relationship performances with long-standing suppliers.