Trust-building in construction contracting: Mechanism and expectation

Trust is defined as the willingness of a trustor to become vulnerable to a trustee whose behavior is beyond his control. The efficiency of a project team can be enhanced should its members trust each other. There have been notable efforts in promoting trust in the construction industry through the use of a variety of trust building mechanisms. However, the reciprocating trusting behaviors that could be expected (identified as trust expectations in this study) has not been elaborated. This study aims to investigate such relationships. For this, trust building mechanisms and trust expectations are identified and then operationalized for the development of their respective measurement scales. With data collected from practitioners, four and three taxonomies of trust-building mechanisms and trust expectations are developed respectively through the use of principal component factor analysis. The former includes: networking, procedural measure, credit rating and calculativeness. The latter consists of self-awareness, responsiveness and value congruence. Their inter-relationships were then examined by structural equation modeling. Networking and calculativeness generally relate positively to most types of trust expectations. Nevertheless, trust-building mechanisms like procedural measure and credit rating are not so related to trust expectations and may even lead to trust deterioration. The findings prompt to further research on the versatility of or the conditions conducive for certain trust-building mechanisms in terms of the trusting behaviors that can be reciprocated.