Trust me! Trust you? The indicators of trust on buyer-seller relationships: pre-and-post COVID-19

Abstract

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have placed immeasurable pressure on national and international buyer-supplier relationships. Disruptive and unpredicted events demonstrate that trust is a critical aspect of buyer-supplier relationships and plays a pivotal role in mediating inter-organisational relationships. However, organisations often struggle to signal trust toward a counterpart to strengthen the buyer-supplier relationship. Additionally, organisations struggle to interpret trust signals from counterparts. This paper utilises systematic quantitative content analyses of newspaper media to identify trust indicators. The paper identifies 51 indicators of trust, thematically clustered, from the content analysis of the Factiva media database. Analysis of the findings identified ten indicators, representing 80% of the total indicators identified from the media analysis. Therefore, utilising the trust indicators may give supply chain practitioners value-added insights and enable parties to signal trust, leading to sustainable buyer-supplier relationships. The paper also gleams into how COVID-19 impacted the indicators of trust.