Effects of cultural ethnicity, firm size, and firm age on senior executives’ trust in their overseas business partners: Evidence from China

By Crystal X. Jiang, Roy Y J Chua, Masaaki Kotabe, Janet Murray. 2011

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate trust relationships between senior business executives and their overseas partners. Drawing on the similarity-attraction paradigm, social categorization theory, and the distinction between cognition- and affect-based trust, we argue that executives trust their overseas partners differently, depending on the partners’ cultural ethnicity. In a field survey of 108 Chinese senior executives, we found that these executives have higher affect-based trust in overseas partners of the same cultural ethnicity as themselves; cognition-based trust is associated with affect-based trust differently when overseas partners are of the same or different cultural ethnicity. We also examine the role of relative firm size and age in shaping intra- and intercultural trust. Relative firm size has a stronger negative effect on executives’ cognition-based trust if their partners are of a different cultural ethnicity. Although firm age does not have a negative effect on executives’ affect-based trust as hypothesized, we found firm age to be positively associated with affect-based trust for partners of the same cultural ethnicity. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of this pattern of inter- and intra-cultural trust on international business and networking (guanxi) dynamics in China.

Subfields: Communication, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d02f5e168a74b42311444e6614b455fb4f94dd39