Critical analysis of trust and power in dyadic business collaborations using a multicase-study approach to provide a framework to improve professional practice and outcomes

Business collaboration is a widely adopted approach to cross organization boundary problems and has become an accepted and often encouraged means for organisations to achieve objectives unobtainable otherwise from their own resources. At the heart of collaborations are agents and actors who bring with them trust and contributions to achievement of the objectives in the form of power. Whilst much has been written separately about trust and about power, there has been little address to how they work together in the achievement of collaboration projects objectives. The aim of this Doctor of Management dissertation was to analyse the combined effects of Trust and Power in business collaboration with a view to improving business practice and achievement of objectives. Definitions of trust and power based in psychology, sociology and wider literature were undertaken to provide a framework for analysis. The methodology employed a mixed method of questionnaires followed by semi-structured interviews on a sample of 18 study collaborations in South Wales, ranging in size from 2 to 30 participant organisations. To analyse data, the literature review provided a typology of collaboration to categorise results into comparable types. Data was analysed by coding empirical results against trust and power facets identified from literature. Trust and power attributes were combined in a matrix to show the interrelationships. The research found that trust underlies any collaboration and was always present. Power is generally used to reinforce, build further trust and contribute to agreed outcomes. Trust and power, with caveats related to external endogenous events, interact in predictable ways that have implications for how successful a collaboration achieves its outcomes. From this, the contribution to practice was developed based on a trust and power collaboration tool, that can be applied by practitioners to assess the respective positions prior to and during various stages of a collaboration with a view to anticipating possible problems and improving outcomes.