Antecedents and Consequences of Trust Development within a Network Marketing Comp
Abstract
Studies within different fields indicate that the most successful social and business relationships are trustworthy, where partners willingly strengthen the ties with the other part. Trust has been also identified as the catalyst in network marketing companies of direct selling, which is predominantly based in human relationships. The present study aims to investigate trust development in terms of trust antecedents, components and consequences within the Amway Network Company in Greece. Field research was conducted by utilizing a structured questionnaire, which was developed by adopting relative constructs reported in literature. The research target sample consisted of Amway’s Independent Business Owners (IBOs). Two hundred and twenty five questionnaires were distributed during company’s big and small conferences in Greece. Moreover, an online version of the questionnaire was created and communicated to IBOs from various regions of Greece via the web, while the same link was also emailed to a small number of IBOs. The resulting sample comprised 151 correctly answered questionnaires. Principal Component Analysis was initially performed to identify latent factors within the questionnaire items measuring the trust antecedents, components and consequences, which led to alterations of the initial model. The emerged trust antecedents were named cultural similarity, privacy concerns and conflict. The trust components were named ability, integrity and goodwill, while the trust consequences were named commitment and perceived continuity. The results of the regression analyses conducted showed that cultural similarity is the most significant antecedent of trust. Moreover, goodwill was found to be the trust component that leads to higher levels of both commitment and perceived continuity.
Keywords: trust, antecedents, consequences, network company, Greece
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