Jeanne M. Brett - Searching for Trust in the Global Economy

Based on solid literature and insights from recent interviews with managers across four regions of the world, Jeanne and Tyree provide extremely useful information about the CORR standards for deciding to trust competence, openness, respect, and rapport. The book is timely in that it offers managers practical tools and tips for building trust, which is the scarce currency of both business and human life in the contemporary world.

Zhi-Xue Zhang, Director, Institute of Social Science Survey, and Professor, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University

This well-written and engaging book will appeal to managers and scholars who are interested in international management and cross-cultural business relationships. The core of the book is an insightful typology that sheds light on how people in four cultural clusters decide if they will trust a potential new business partner. Vivid examples and quotations illustrate differences in the four cultural clusters, and the book provides tangible suggestions for dealing with cultural differences.

Linn Van Dyne, Professor Emerita, The Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University

This book lays out an insightful cultural framework that provides a practical approach to unpacking the complexity of building trust across cultures. As a scientist-practitioner specializing in survey methodology, Im eager to apply this framework toward creating trust with employees across the globe such that they feel safe and empowered to share their much-needed voices.

Elizabeth McCune, Director of Employee Listening, Microsoft

In a single volume, Jeanne Brett and Tyree Mitchell have provided the tools to significantly transform our understanding of the dynamics of trust and culture in a global economy. This book employs the latest analytic tools of tight vs. loose cultures to understand trust dynamics; employs valuable interviews and ethnographic data from multiple regions of the world to add rich and meaningful texture to its assessments; is eminently readable by both academics and practitioners; readily applies its analyses to draw implications for improving trust judgments and dynamics between international business partners.

Roy J. Lewicki, Irving Abramowitz Memorial Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University

Brett and Mitchell provide an elegant way to think about cross-cultural differences in trust. They use the most powerful recent development in cross-cultural psychology the idea of tight and loose cultures to break the world down into four clusters, each of which uses different tactics for building trust. This model will provide an ah-ha moment to managers who have worked abroad, and a useful guide for those just starting to do business abroad.

Raymond A. Friedman, Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Management, Vanderbilt University

One of the most important global business skills is the ability to build trust with people from different cultures. Searching for Trust in the Global Economy is seminal reading for anyone working in a cross-cultural context, whether in-person or virtually. The book is a must-read for all culturally agile professionals.

Paula Caligiuri, Distinguished Professor, International Business at Northeastern University and author of Build Your Cultural Agility

Jeanne M. Brett and
Tyree D. Mitchell

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London

Rotman-UTP Publishing
An imprint of University of Toronto Press
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Jeanne M. Brett and Tyree D. Mitchell

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Searching for trust in the global economy / Jeanne M. Brett, Tyree D. Mitchell.

Names: Brett, Jeanne M., author. | Mitchell, Tyree D., author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022014155X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220141630 | ISBN 9781487527952 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487527976 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487527969 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Trust Economic aspects. | LCSH: Trust Cross-cultural studies. | LCSH: Partnership. | LCSH: Success in business.

Classification: LCC HB72 .B74 2022 | DDC 650.1/3 dc23

ISBN 978-1-4875-2795-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4875-2797-6 (EPUB)
ISBN 978-1-4875-2796-9 (PDF)

We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press operates. This land is the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Mtis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for its publishing activities.

• Its not, I trust, I verify; its I verify first, then I trust. (133, Lebanon)
• Trust but verify; people are not on the watch for distrust, but dont ignore signs either. (150, US)
• Its not like testing I trust you, but testing if you can do it. (103, China)
• You have to know the person before youre able to say you trust them. (140, Brazil)

Trust peoples willingness to make themselves vulnerable to others despite the potential for exploitation Trust promotes successful social interaction and economic transactions.

People around the world understand the importance of trust, but they do not all think about trust in exactly the same way, What is less understood is how people go about deciding to trust. When we asked 82 managers from 33 different countries How do you decide whether to trust a potential business partner? their answers were noticeably different, as illustrated by our opening quotes. In talking with managers who were engaged in the risky process of developing new business relationships, we wanted to know what key actions they relied on when searching for information to make the trust decision and what standards they used to evaluate that information and decide to trust. We were curious whether managers around the world engaged in the same key actions and relied on the same standards. We wanted to know if there were systematic cultural differences in the process of deciding to trust and, if so, why. These questions led to the research that underlies this book.

To answer these questions, we interviewed managers from across four regions of the world East Asia, the Middle East/South Asia, Latin America, and the West who were engaged in new business development. Our interviews revealed four key actions and four core standards that managers used when searching for and deciding to trust. The key actions are due diligence, brokering, goodwill building, and testing. The core standards are competence, openness, respect, and rapport (CORR). The interviews also revealed that use of these key search actions and CORR decision standards varied by geographical region.

To explain the systematic regional differences in the process of searching for and deciding to trust a potential new business partner, we propose a simple framework defined by cultural levels of trust and tightness-looseness the strength of social norms and social sanctioning of deviations. This trust by tightness-looseness cultural framework categorizes East Asia as high trust and culturally tight; the Middle East/South Asia as low trust and culturally tight; Latin America as low trust and culturally loose; and the West as high trust and culturally loose. The key to understanding why managers in different regions rely more on some search actions and standards than others lies in understanding how their cultures vary in levels of trust and tightness-looseness.