Bridging East and West to Develop New Products and Trust: Interdependence and Interaction Between a Hong Kong Parent and North American Subsidiary

Trusting relationships have been theorised to be critical for specialists to work together but little research has clarified how trust can be fostered. Deutsch's theory of cooperation and competition was used to examine how trust is developed among new product specialists based in the Hong Kong parent and its Canadian subsidiary. Effective conflict management may be critical for both the innovation needed to create new products and for trust. The study proposes that trust is tested and strengthened when people disagree with each other openly and use each other's ideas to be more productive. Results indicate that cooperative goals contribute to an open-minded discussion of views that lead to productive collaborative work, which in turn, results in trust.