Contingency Misfit and Organizational Trust Buffers

Scholarly research streams in the strategic management literature have time and again confirmed the relevance of organization-environment fit for performance (Volberda et al 2011, Burton and Obel 2004, Burton et al. 2008, Ketchen et al. 1997). Configuration misfits between environmental uncertainty, strategy and structure however are only found to affect performance to a certain degree (Burton Lauridsen and Obel, 2002). A number of explanations have been put forward including complexity induced ruggedness or institutional fit buffers. In this paper, we suggest that organizational trust can work as an additional misfit buffer for performance that escapes traditional contingency perspectives. We are developing a contingency framework for configurational misfit buffers of organizational trust, which we validate based on data collected from 238 organizations