Exloring trust in organisations within a supply chain: a literature review-based study

Trust acts as an indispensable personal attachment in human relations. Without a doubt, trust is always present where people exist, and of course, there is no exception for the business environment. After witnessing actual trust-deficit cases in supply chain practices, and realising the state of flux for academic efforts in supply chain trust, the author was motivated to conduct a literature review-based study to depict how trust issues affect organisations within the supply chain. After researching a vast number of supply chain trust-related articles, this study has differentiated two types of trust in the supply chain situation: dyadic and clustered supply chain trust; included, analysed and generalised both factors and outcomes that had been previously researched to have influences on supply chain trust, or on which supply chain trust had impacted. A final theoretical framework was constructed for the purpose of demonstrating the overall relationship among influential factors, trust and the impacted outcomes for supply chain practice. For future research directions, this study last provides a theoretical research framework which exposes a number of research gaps in current supply chain trust studies. Prospective researchers can utilise this study as a reference point to continue studying trust issues in supply chain management. For practitioners, this study can provide some guidelines to help them handle trust issues in their supply chain situations.