The changing bases of mutual trust formation in inter-organizational relationships: A dyadic study of university-industry research collaborations

We examine how trust in inter-organizational relationships develops over time. Specifically, we study the moderating effect of relationship maturity with various trust bases in the context of university-industry (UI) research collaborations. Examining trust formation with dyadic data allows us to take into account that partners' perceptions of relationship factors are not independent of each other's actions. We adopt the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) for the analysis of data on 98 matched pairs of recent UI research collaborations and find that relationship maturity moderates the associations of reciprocal communication and decision process similarity with trust. The results further indicate that mutual trust formation is also influenced by the other partners' perceptions of relationship factors. The findings suggest UI research partners can develop and maintain a trustful collaboration through reciprocal communication and, in the long term, by converging towards similar decision making processes.