On hard and soft models to analyze trust life cycle for mediating collaboration

Mediating short-term collaboration among organizations is very challenging in today’s open world due to: the increasing intensity of market competition on acquisition of opportunities, the demand for the large amount of resources and the large number of different competencies, and the continuous increasing scarcity of resources, among others. One approach for organizations to reduce the severity of these challenges is joining their initiatives through collaborations. However, each organization has interests and goals that might be different and contradicting with those of other partners. Consequently, establishing fruitful collaboration is challenging and a proper approach to mediate collaboration among organizations is needed to support resolving emerging disputes during their interactions. Creating trust among organizations encourages them to quickly join their efforts to respond to these challenges and thus commit to the established collaboration. This paper addresses trust as a way to mediate collaboration among organizations. It addresses aspects related to soft-models and hard-models of trust and presents the application of these models in analyzing trust subjectively and objectively respectively. The paper finally introduces stages of life cycle of trust among organizations.