Dr. Evelien Croonen — Assistant Professor – Faculty of Economics and Business – Groningen University – The Netherlands et Professeur Invitée à l’IGR-IAE Rennes — présentera l’une de ses recherches intitulée « They are jolly good fellows! A framework for antecedents and consequences of peer trust in franchise networks«  et co-écrite avec Reinder Hamming le jeudi 29 novembre 2018 à 12h30 en Amphi 2.

Abstract: Given partners’ mixed motives in franchise networks, trust between franchise partners is an important issue in franchising research. Most research has focused on trust of franchisees in their franchisors, whereas it has neglected trust of franchisees in their fellow franchisees or ‘peers’ in the network (‘peer trust’). This paper contributes to franchising research by developing an integrative theoretical framework on antecedents and consequences of franchisees’ peer trust. Given the similarities between peer trust and coworker trust within organizations, we conduct a systematic literature review on the antecedents and consequences of coworker trust and translate these insights to a franchising context to develop our own integrative framework on antecedents and consequences of peer trust in franchise networks. Our framework distinguishes four types of antecedents of franchisees’ peer trust: franchisee (i.e. trustor) characteristics, peer (i.e. trustee) characteristics, franchisor characteristics and franchise network characteristics. Moreover, we distinguish four types of consequences of franchisees’ peer trust: citizenship behaviour, commitment, counterproductive behaviour and performance. Finally, on the basis of our integrative framework we discuss avenues for future research on peer trust in franchise networks.