سیستم های کنترل مدیریت به عنوان سازندگان اعتماد درون سازمانی در روابط در حال تکامل : شواهدی از یک مطالعه موردی طولی

Research on inter-organizational relationships argues that at mature stages, when trust has reached a high level, it will be damaged by new management control systems (MCSs). This longitudinal case study provides evidence to the contrary: in an open-ended and evolving relationship, even when trust is well established, MCSs can build it. High trust provides a platform where success encourages the partners to cooperate further, demanding, in turn, more MCSs and greater levels of trust to support cooperation. By providing evidence with a greater appearance of objectivity than infor- mal controls can yield, action and result controls improve partners’ perception of each other’s trustworthiness, and build competence and goodwill-based trust. MCSs are used not only to supervise but also to coordinate, and this sec- ond, more salient function avoids possible suspicions that could damage trust.

This case study provides evidence that, even when trust is well established, MCSs enable condi- tions that favour trust, and directly build trust. In mature, open-ended IORs, high trust and stability provide a platform where the initial conditions evolve. Success encourages the partners to cooper- ate further, requiring greater confidence and, in turn, demanding more MCSs and greater levels of trust to support cooperation. In this setting,where the level of confidence is dynamic, the leader firm can develop MCSs to reach the new intended stage without damaging the existing trust. From both sides of the IOR, the findings illustrate that it is not only informal controls that act as trust builders, as claimed by Das and Teng (2001) . Action and result controls do not nec- essarily cause inflexibility, but can improve agents’ independence and increase their chances to demon- strate their competences inside the established lim- its. Action and result controls provide evidence with a greater appearance of objectivity. Further- more, because both parties work with the same systems (action and result controls), formal MCSs improve their perception of each other’s trustworthiness. We found that both parties used MCSs to coor- dinate the new complex tasks, which encouraged commitment and created trust. MCSs create a frame to advance the ability to solve problems, and to manage interdependencies. The leader firm, ‘‘ giving in order to receive ” , at the same time kept control of the end market, improving the joint results and satisfaction. Although the manufacturer used the same MCS tools to coordinate and to supervise, owing to their shared nature, the channel perceived much more coordination than monitor- ing, and this avoided possible suspicions that could damage trust. Furthermore, the manufacturer’s use of non-coercive tactics helped the channel membersto see monitoring as a mechanism for overall improvement, as protection against unfair reward sharing, and as recognition of their work. The results and the constraints of our study sug- gest avenues for further research. First, our case study highlights that agents’ trust in the commer- cial employees contributed to their ready accep- tance of new MCSs and influenced their perception of these as systems of assistance; it would be interesting to analyse the role of MCSs in facilitating the transmission between interper- sonal and inter-organizational trust by developing routines and cultural processes. Second, this paper focuses on how MCSs can create positive expecta- tions about the trustee’s characteristics. Future research could use other different constructs of trust, such as system trust ( Luhmann, 1979 )or institutional based trust, and could observe how MCSs can generate institutional trust and give the trustor confidence in the trustee, over the evo- lution of the IOR. Finally, the case study results show that MCSs have acted as trust builders even when trust was well-established. The conditions of the case have allowed us to study this association centring on common aspects of the relationships between the manufacturing firm and its 176 distri- bution channel members. An extension of this work would carry out another research strategy to consider every dyadic relationships in order to analyse different rates of growth in trust provoked by the MCSs development, as well as moderating variables that can explain such differences.