Trust in family businesses: A more comprehensive empirical review

Abstract

Trust has been used in family business research mostly to explain firm performance or as a characteristic of family businesses. Despite this interest to trust, theories and evidence accumulating on trust in family business is not well integrated and that the literature as a whole lacks coherence. The study, focuses on conceptualizations and operationalization of trust, addresses some issues relating to trust and represents an empirical research to investigate parts and contents of trust within family businesses. Our findings support our belief, decision and action models. The results suggest that contents of trust determine the trustor’s perception of other party’s trustworthiness in family businesses. There is a necessity to follow integrated model of trust in future family business researches, since trust is an important factor in this field and need to be investigated more coherently.

Keywords

• trust
• family business