The authors investigate the role of trust between knowledge users and knowledge providers. The kind of knowledge of special concern is formal market research. Users include marketing and nonmarketing managers; providers include marketing researchers within a user's own firm and those external to the firm. A theory of the relationships centering on personal trust is developed to examine (1) how users’ trust in researchers influences various relationship processes and the use of market research and (2) how the relationships vary when examined across dyads. The relationships were tested in a sample of 779 users and providers of market research information. Results indicate that trust and perceived quality of interaction contribute most significantly to research utilization, with trust having indirect effects through other relationship processes, as opposed to important direct effects on research utilization. Deeper levels of exchange, including researcher involvement in the research process and user commitment to the research relationship, however, have little effect on research use. Finally, the relationships in the model show few differences depending on whether the producer and user share marketing or research orientations. Interorganizational dyads, however, generally exhibit stronger model relationships than intraorganizational dyads.

“Quadrads” (double dyads) of interviews, each conducted with a pair of marketing executives at a Japanese vendor firm and a pair of purchasing executives at a Japanese customer firm, provided data on corporate culture, customer orientation, innovativeness, and market performance. Business performance (relative profitability, relative size, relative growth rate, and relative share of market) was correlated positively with the customer's evaluation of the supplier's customer orientation, but the supplier's own assessment of customer orientation did not correspond well to that of the customer. Japanese companies with corporate cultures stressing competitiveness (markets) and entrepreneurship (adhocracies) outperformed those dominated by internal cohesiveness (clans) or by rules (hierarchies). Successful market innovation also improved performance.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Building on previous work suggesting that trust is critical in facilitating exchange relationships, the authors describe a comprehensive theory of trust in market research relationships. This theory focuses on the factors that determine users' trust in their researchers, including individual, interpersonal, organizational, interorganizational/interdepartmental, and project factors. The theory is tested in a sample of 779 users. Results indicate that the interpersonal factors are the most predictive of trust. Among these factors, perceived researcher integrity, willingness to reduce research uncertainty, confidentiality, expertise, tactfulness, sincerity, congeniality, and timeliness are most strongly associated with trust. Among the remaining factors, the formalization of the user's organization, the culture of the researcher's department or organization, the research organization's or department's power, and the extent to which the research is customized also affect trust. These findings generally do not change across different types of dyadic relationships. 'We use the term "market" research rather than "marketing" research throughout to refer to the information that is collected rather than the functional area or department. Hence, our focus is on market tion (Moorman, Zaltman, and Deshpand6 1992). Trust is important to research relationships because, among other things, users must frequently rely on market research to design and evaluate marketing strategies, though they are often unable to evaluate research quality. Hence, being able to trust researchers to ensure quality and to interpret implications correctly for the firm is critical to the user's reliance on research in decision making. American Marketing Association THE use of information has been identified as a source of a firm's market orientation (Kohli andDespite the importance of trust, scholarly inquiry on the topic has been hampered in two ways. First, very little academic research has attempted to document empirically the factors that affect trust in marketing relationships (cf. Anderson and Weitz 1990; Dwyer and Oh 1987). In fact, no study has attempted to develop a theoretical framework of factors that influence trust in research relationships. Second, research has not systematically distinguished trust from related factors. For example, Sullivan and Peterson (1982) assess trust by measuring sincerity, caution, effort in establishing a relationship, equality, goal congruence, consistency, and expectations of cooperation. Crosby, Evans, and Cowles (1990) assess trust research information though we consider relationships between various users and marketing researchers.