Spirituality as an antecedent of trust and network commitment: The case of Anatolian Tigers

This paper investigates the role of spirituality in network commitment and trust building through a focus on the specific network context of Anatolian Tigers from Turkey. Despite the previous research employing utilitarian perspectives to explain the antecedents of commitment, the aim here is to understand the role played by spirituality, a higher-order dimension of human life, in commitment at a network level. The study adopts a survey approach. A hundred and twenty questionnaires were conducted through face-to-face meetings with owners/managers of the sample firms. A partial least squares (PLS) path modelling approach is employed to examine relationships through a 'soft-modelling' analysis, using SmartPLS 3. The results empirically confirm that spirituality operates as a significant antecedent of network commitment and trust in the context of networks among Anatolian Tigers. Furthermore, it is found that neither the length of membership nor the firm size has any significant effect on network commitment. The paper contributes to the understanding of antecedents of network commitment by going beyond traditional economic perspectives whose argument, historically, has been that commitment is driven by utilitarian, profit- and utility-maximizing motivations and economic self-interests.