Cooperation, Trust and Performance: Empirical Results from Three Countries

Reverting to the resource-based view of strategic management and cooperation theory, we provide argumentation for the value of two critical resources to cooperating firms: cooperation experience and maxim-based trust. The results of a large-scale survey in three European countries (Austria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic) reveal an important fact: although cooperation experience contributes to business performance, the contribution of maxim-based trust to success is significantly higher. As a result, corporate success depends not only on the quantity of cooperation experience, but also - and to an even greater extent - on the quality of cooperation with regard to the form of coordinative power established within the cooperation arrangement. Given that maxim-based trust has been identified as a feasible coordination mechanism in cooperation relationships, it might therefore be freed from its frequent characterization as utopian and out of touch with reality.