Trust‐building strategies in inter‐organizational negotiations

Abstract

One challenge for multinational organizations is to manage inter‐organizational relationships with customers, collaborators, competitors, governments and other important stakeholder organizations. Negotiations can be seen as a process to manage interdependence and conflicts of interests between parties. As a result, negotiation analysis and theory provide a useful framework to analyze dynamics of relationship‐ and trust‐building and hence are increasingly important for the understanding of inter‐organizational relationships. This paper explores the set of strategies managers can implement in negotiations to establish relationships based on mutual understanding and trust in order to reach satisfactory agreements and manage inter‐organizational dependencies and its associated threats.