Understanding trust in supply chain relationships

The popularity of supply chain partnerships has exploded over the past few years with an increasing interest in the role of trust in facilitating the relationship. There has been a noticeable increase in the last quarter of the twentieth century of the importance of trust in partnerships and alliances in management literature. This paper deals with the nature and crucial role played by trust in long‐term relationships and tries to integrate a number of different perspectives to develop a framework along with three issues: ways the term “trust” is used, factors leading to trusting behaviour in the customer‐supplier relationship, and the effect of trust on the behaviour of a customer and a supplier. The paper presents some insights for supply chain managers from which they can examine their own partner relationships and provides supply chain managers with an in‐depth analysis of how to manage their supply chain relationships.