Guanxi, Trust, and long-term orientation in Chinese business markets

Abstract

This research focuses on buying firms' trust in a supplier's salesperson and posits that this type of trust is determined by characteristics of the salesperson, the interpersonal relationships between a salesperson and the buying firm's boundary personnel, and characteristics of personal interactions between these two parties. More important, the authors discuss the concept of interpersonal relationships in the context of Chinese culture and model it as a three-dimensional latent construct, which, in some literature, is called guanxi. A key aspect of this research is that the authors investigate the impact of each dimension of guanxi on salesperson trust separately. Moreover, the authors consider the buying firm's trust in the supplying firm and its long-term orientation toward the supplier the consequences of salesperson trust. To test the model, the authors use data collected from 128 buying organizations in Hong Kong. The sampled firms are from both the government and private sectors.