The impact of trust in international alliances - how satisfied are foreign companies with their cooperation with Portuguese partners?

Abstract

This study will focus on the impact of trust, as a culturally defined characteristic of societies, in the performance of the alliances taking place between Portuguese partners and foreign ones. It is a work in progress and it involves different aspects to be dealt with at the same time: trust, national culture and cooperation. The operationalisation of those aspects will be done by the use of both a qualitative and a quantitative approach. The results may help managers to develop a trust production process that may enable the achievement of their objectives throughout collaborative forms and its importance in internationalisation processes. The overall aim is filling some gaps identified in the literature in terms of the overlapping characteristics of presented topics, namely its actionability. Thus far, it has been done some research about trust and cooperative strategies that will be summarized in sections 1 and 2. The following sections will sum up the efforts done concerning model development and the methodology to use. The last part will recap work done to date and present intentions in terms of research.