How interpersonal ties affect interorganizational trust in construction projects: role differences and cross-level effects

Interorganizational trust significantly impacts performance, while distrust leads to high costs. How to effectively build interorganizational trust is critical, whereas few studies point out how boundary spanners, as representatives of the interaction between two organisations, affect interorganizational trust. The authors put forward a trust-building mechanism to verify whether interpersonal ties (obligatory ties, instrumental ties, and affective ties) promote interorganizational trust through the establishment of interpersonal trust and compare the differences in trust-building mechanisms between different boundary spanners (project leaders and team members). By adopting structural equation modelling and regression analysis, the data of 271 questionnaires from the construction industry in China reveal that as for team members, cognitive and affective trust significantly mediate the relationship between interpersonal ties and interorganizational trust. But as for project leaders, only cognitive trust has a significant mediating effect. This cross-level mechanism to answer how interpersonal ties affect interorganizational trust further enriches social embeddedness theory. Meanwhile, by distinguishing the differences of trust-building mechanisms between different boundary spanners, the research on stakeholders’ trust-building mechanisms can also be expanded.