How Organizational Is Interorganizational Trust?

Trust represents a key social mechanism facilitating collaboration in interorganizational relationships. Yet, the concept of interorganizational trust is surrounded by substantial ambiguity, especially as it pertains to the levels of analysis at which it is located. Some scholars maintain that trust is an inherently individual-level phenomenon, whereas others insist that organizations constitute the central sources and referents of trust in interorganizational relationships. Our article addresses this controversy, aiming to reduce conceptual ambiguity and foster cumulative progress. Using a micro-sociological approach, we advance knowledge of the meaning and context-specific relevance of individual- versus organizational-level trust. Specifically, we apply the notion of organizational actorhood to both the trustor and the trustee in an interorganizational relationship. We then build on micro-institutional and entitativity theory to offer a model of the antecedents of organizational actorhood that identifies a set of contextual conditions explaining the degree to which an organization rather than individuals within it constitutes the focal origin and target of trust. The contingent account we propose here helps bridge disparate traditions of scholarship on interorganizational trust by highlighting that trust can, but need not always, reside to a substantial extent at a supraindividual level of analysis.