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Trust in buyer–supplier relations: the case of the Turkish automotive industry

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Abstract

While the topic of interorganisational trust is gaining attention in academic literature, research on developing countries remains sparse. With the premise that certain contextual elements may be more relevant for developing countries, we expand on existing models by testing the effect of initial support, use of just-in-time delivery, and informal commitment to predict the trust that Turkish automotive suppliers have towards their buyers. The results support the predictions that soft technologies and informal commitment increase trust.

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Notes

  1. www.taysad.org.tr, the official website of the Association of Automobile Parts and Component Manufacturers, also has supporting reports.

  2. Ercan Tezer, General Secretary of the Automotive Manufacturers Association, personal communication, 11 October 2005, 31 October 2005.

  3. Burak Arkan, Board Member of the Uludag Automotive and Sub-Industry Exporters Union, personal communication, 18 October 2005, 10 November 2005.

  4. Bedir (1999) reports that there is a widespread belief among Turkish automotive suppliers that the buyer company would reduce or cancel its orders in case of a shrinkage of its own market. This leads to suppliers working with more than one buyer to achieve economies of scale, a factor that Bedir (2002) claims exacerbates the lack of cooperation between buyers and suppliers.

  5. When the remaining 3% of firms that used contracts were probed as to the nature of the contracts, it was seen that orders given by fax were considered to be a contract.

  6. As an example, another study on the nature of trust between buyers and sellers by Doney and Cannon (1997) has a 31% response rate.

  7. As suggested by one of the reviewers, we also controlled for foreign ownership. However, neither the main nor the interaction effects with the hypothesised antecedents were significant, and the results did not change.

  8. 1: ‘Annually’; 2: ‘Quarterly’; 3: ‘Monthly’; 4: ‘Weekly’.

  9. Research indicates that the choice of missing data technique becomes more important when the amount of missing data approaches 15–20% of the data set (Roth, 1994). Since the missing data percentages on the single-item scales were in the range of 2–7% of the data, mean substitution was considered appropriate.

  10. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their constructive and developmental suggestions, and Professor Anand Swaminathan for his guidance. This research was partially supported by a Middle East Technical University Research Fund grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

    Syeda Nazli Wasti

  2. Faculty of Management, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Syeda Arzu Wasti

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  1. Syeda Nazli Wasti
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Correspondence to Syeda Nazli Wasti.

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Accepted by Arie Y Lewin, Editor-in-Chief, 7 March 2007. This paper has been with the authors for two revisions.

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Wasti, S., Wasti, S. Trust in buyer–supplier relations: the case of the Turkish automotive industry. J Int Bus Stud 39, 118–131 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400309

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