Learning, Trust, and Technological Collaboration

TLDR

Companies increasingly collaborate in technology to learn and manage uncertainty, but success hinges on strong inter‑personal trust, which is vulnerable to turnover and conflict. The paper argues that interorganizational trust is essential for sustaining successful technological collaborations amid inevitable interpersonal challenges. Interorganizational trust is built through shared interests, receptive cultures, and continuous, widespread knowledge of the collaboration’s status and purpose among employees.

Abstract

Companies increasingly collaborate in their technological activities. Collaboration enables firms to learn about uncertain and turbulent technological change, and enhances their ability to deal with novelty. A number of studies reveal the importance for successful collaboration of high levels of inter-personal trust between scientists, engineers, and managers in the different partners. However, these individual relationships are vulnerable to labor turnover and inter-personal difficulties. Using two examples of highly successful technological collaborations, it is argued that the survival of such relationships in the face of these inevitable inter-personal problems requires the establishment of interorganizational trust. Such trust is characterized by community of interest, organizational cultures receptive to external inputs, and widespread and continually supplemented knowledge among employees of the status and purpose of the collaboration.