Marimon, Laura (2022) The trust mechanisms of ability, benevolence and integrity: a connection to perceived firm transparency and legitimacy of sustainable versus unsustainable companies. Master thesis, Sustainable Entrepreneurship (SE).
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Abstract
Trust is a very valuable asset to possess as a company and due to a persistent and debilitating skepticism amongst consumers and stakeholders of the business world, it is gaining attention from scholars and researchers. This paper explores the relationship between transparency, legitimacy and the three factors of trustworthiness (benevolence, integrity, and ability). A hybrid approach is taken including an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with six potential customers of Active Giving (a sustainable application) to elicit their perspectives on perceived transparency, legitimacy, and the importance of each trust mechanism, for a group of three sustainable and three unsustainable companies. The analysis shows that there is a strong correlation between perceived transparency and legitimacy, but the results for the trust mechanisms seem inconclusive and show weak effects. This may be explained by several points and open avenues for further research, including adding propensity to trust in the model, extending the data collection process, delving into other relationships other than customer- company and altering the model to fit the variables better. Skepticism and the trust process is explored during the interviews and generate interesting insights into the details of what enhances the trustworthiness of a firm.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
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| Name supervisor: | Faber, N.R. |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Sep 2022 09:48 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Sep 2022 09:48 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/201 |
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