Low levels of productivity and recent evolutions in technology and practices are pushing the construction industry to collaborate on a higher level. A key component of effective collaboration is trust. Research also suggests that increased trust levels can lead to improved productivity in team performance. Trust appears to be valued by industry practitioners at the executive level but it also appears that active management of trust is minimal. With Design Science Research methodology as a framework, this project uses a mixed methods approach to develop and test a tool designed to assist in the management of trust levels between construction project participants. This project lays the groundwork for additional research into trust-building in construction by testing whether or not trust can be actively built and managed by rigorous analysis of current and upcoming relationships. In addition to supporting data from case studies, this was accomplished by introducing specific trust-building techniques into student group interactions and comparing changes in interpersonal trust levels to a control group of students. Results from the case studies and student experiment show some support for the idea that interpersonal trust levels, as perceived by the person making the attempts to build trust within the group, can be increased through use of a tool such as the one developed. Further testing and development is needed prior to wider industry application.

In order to create sustainable competitive advantages, organizations are embedded in dyadic exchange relationships, which depend on the coordination of the behavior of the actors involved. Often, coordinated behavior is explained by trust. Since trust develops in a process of reciprocal responses to presumed trustworthy behavior, it is a reciprocity-based concept. While inter-organizational exchange relationships can appear in different stages (forming, establishing, broken), different reciprocity types (direct, indirect, negative) can be distinguished. The study links reciprocal behavior to different stages of inter-organizational exchange relationships in order to investigate reciprocity as a possible coordination mechanism of behavior and thus explore the basis of coordination of trust-based behavior. Qualitative Comparative Analysis as a set-theoretic approach is applied to analyze the empirical data consisting of 78 qualitative semi-structured interviews with managers of small-, medium- and large-sized companies. The results show that different reciprocity types become effective in different stages of an inter-organizational exchange relationship: For forming inter-organizational exchange relationships indirect reciprocal behavior, besides direct reciprocity, becomes effective while in establishing inter-organizational exchange relationships, direct reciprocal behavior is evident. Negative reciprocal behavior leads to a break up of relationships. Using these results, on the one hand, the concept of trust can be sharpened by deepening the understanding of the trust-building mechanisms and on the other hand, reciprocity can be seen as coordination mechanism in exchange relationships of different stages. In doing so, with this knowledge, relationships can be coordinated towards a long-term orientation in order to create sustainable advantages.