In the shadow of a negative past: repairing and developing trust in construction projects

Trust is foundational to establishing and maintaining relationships. Construction project management research has long touted the importance of trust for project organisation and performance. Yet there has been less research interest in repairing and developing inter-organisational trust once trust has been violated and reduced. This study presents a process-based case study of restoring and enhancing trust in a main-contractor-and-subcontractor relationship after project experiences that deteriorated trust. Drawing on conceptual frameworks of trust repair and development, the research analysed the practices of both main-contractor and subcontractor companies. The analysis reveals that, although involving different project teams, the violation of trust in past experiences impacted relationships and interactions in the focal project. To repair and develop trust requires a process of discovering causes and accepting responsibility, forming interventions to repair dimensions of trustworthiness that have been damaged and evaluating the effectiveness of intervention. The research identifies three types of mechanisms that facilitated trust repair and development in construction: sense-making, structural control and relational approaches. This study contributes to knowledge in that it recognises the temporal embeddedness of inter-organisational relationships in construction projects and empirically demonstrates the process and practices of repairing and developing inter-organisational trust.