Initiating Trust in a Hostile Environment: A Case Study of Leaders Forging a New Transnational Partnership in Iraq

Transnational or global partnerships and intercultural strategic alliances require organizational leaders who will proactively engage risk and establish initial trust at the earliest stage of the emerging new relationship, especially where the prospective partnership must overcome a hostile external environment in which risk is high. Recent models of trust have emphasized the importance of trusting behavior that occurs early in the relationship. The model proposed by Jarvenpaa, Knoll, and Leidner (1998) refers to such early behavior as trusting action. Trusting action resembles a form of emergent trust or trust ex ante, similar to swift trust. This case study considers a new transnational partnership between two faith-based nonprofit charitable organizations—one in Iraq and the other in the United States. The study reports how risk-taking behavior and trusting action by leaders overcame a hostile, low-trust environment to create the intercultural relationship of trust essential to forming a strategic alliance. The findings support Jarvenpaa et al.’s proposition that initial trusting action functions both directly as a nontraditional antecedent of trust and indirectly by enhancing other antecedents. A need remains for additional case studies on how leadership initiatives can strategically employ mechanisms and interactions of early trusting behaviors to expedite such partnerships and alliances.