State of the Art Review for Trust Maintenance in Organizations

The nature of trust in business relationships is dynamic rather than static. Trust has evolutionary phases or a life cycle. This pattern of evolution can be described as building, maintaining and destroying. Building trust comes at high cost and hard effort. Therefore, once trust has been established in a business relationship, every effort must be made to maintain it. Maintaining trust can be defined as an effort to maximize the benefits of a relationship and to prevent the level of trust from decreasing to the destroying phase. Grounded in state-of-the-art literature, this paper presents current insights for the research into trust maintenance and suggests directions for future research in this field.