The role of trust in family business stakeholder relationships: A systematic literature review

Abstract

An increasing number of studies emphasize the importance of trust between family businesses and their stakeholders. Surprisingly, family business research still lacks a comprehensive understanding of the role of trust in stakeholder relationships; whereas another field—that of organizational behavior—has examined trust-building in depth. Thus, in order to identify specific research gaps and to determine future research directions, we systematically review the literature on trust in the field of family business, as well as in organizational behavior research. Both streams pursue different, hence complementary, approaches in terms of the type of trusting stakeholders, theory building, nomological network (antecedents, components and consequences of trust), level of analysis and type of trust. Whilst family business research maintains a focus on the consequences of trust, organizational behavior focuses rather on its components. We formulate a set of propositions and future research questions as to how insights from organizational behavior research can help to fill existing research gaps and advance our understanding of trust in the management of family business stakeholder relationships.