Relationship Trust in E-Commerce

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Relationship trust is defined as "the subjective probability with which organizational members collectively assess that a particular transaction will occur according to their confident expectations" (Ratnasingam, 2003). Thus, certainty in an e-commerce relationship requires that both the people and the technical systems are reliable. Table 1 presents three types of relationship trust identified from previous research. They include competence, predictability, and goodwill relationship trust.

Table 1: Different Types of Trust in Business Relationships.

Source	Competence Relationship Trust Economic Foundation	Predictability Relationship Trust Familiarity Foundation	Goodwill Relationship Trust Empathy Foundation
Gabarro (1987)	Character Role competence	Judgement	Motives/Intentions
Mayer, Davis & Schoorman (1995)	Ability	Integrity	Benevolence
McAllister (1995)	Cognitive	Cognitive → affective	Affective
Lewicki & Bunker (1996)	Deterrence/Calculus	Knowledge	Identification
Mishra (1996)	Competence	Reliability	Openness Care Concern

Competence Relationship Trust

Competence relationship trust emphasizes reliance on trading partners' skills, technical knowledge, and ability to operate B2B e-commerce applications correctly. Previous research suggests that large powerful buyers in the automotive industry sign contractual service level agreements with their smaller suppliers in order to monitor their performance. Performance assessment includes quality of goods, services, timely delivery, and accuracy of data received (Helper, 1991; Webster, 1995).

Predictability Relationship Trust

Predictability relationship trust emphasizes reliability in trading partners' consistent behaviors that provide sufficient knowledge for other trading partners to make predictions and judgements due to prior experiences. Thus, a chain of positive consistent behaviors makes trading partners reliable, predictable, and therefore trustworthy.

Goodwill Relationship Trust

Goodwill relationship trust emphasizes the reliance upon trading partners' care, concern, honesty and benevolence that allows trading partners to further invest in their trading partner relationships. Goodwill trust is characterized by an increased level of cooperation, open communication, commitment, and sharing of knowledge and information, thereby leading to increased e-commerce participation. Thus, these three types of relationship trust, competence, relationship predictability trust, and goodwill relationship trust, form the underlying taxonomy of inter-organizational or trading partner trust used in this study.

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