Trust and commitment in Vietnam: the industrial distributor's perspective

Purpose - Emerging economies provide a challenging backdrop for the building of trusting and committed cross‐border relationships; weak legal institutions and a turbulent business environment necessitate such relationships between business partners to effectively cope with external instabilities. The purpose of this paper is to focus on foreign supplier‐incumbent industrial distributor relations in the emerging economy of Vietnam. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is an exploratory and expository study of relationship marketing incorporating personal experiences and the opinions of five incumbent industrial distributors in Vietnam. Findings - Using Lewickiet al.'s multi‐dimensional conceptualization of trust (which included the dimension of distrust), this exploratory study corroborated with preceding works in identifying some of these positive consequences of trust; but diverged from this research area, by also identifying the areas of distributor distrust that marked out the constraints of the relationship. Trust and commitment was found to be context‐dependent, where the narrative of a “good relationship” was contextually bound by the individual distributors' various experiences in Vietnam. Originality/value - This paper allows researchers and practitioners to gain an understanding of the business environment and to build a contextual picture of the challenges faced by distributors operating in Vietnam.