Trust is an important driver of superior alliance performance. Alliance managers are influential in this regard because trust requires active involvement, commitment and the dedicated support of the key actors involved in the strategic alliance. Despite the importance of trust for explaining alliance performance, little effort has been made to systematically investigate the mechanisms that managers can use to purposefully create trust in strategic alliances. We use Parkhe's (J World Bus 33:417-437, 1998b) theoretical framework to derive nine hypotheses that distinguish between process-based, characteristic-based and institutional-based trust-building mechanisms. Our meta-analysis of 64 empirical studies shows that trust is strongly related to alliance performance. Process-based mechanisms are more important for building trust than characteristic-and institutional-based mechanisms. The effects of prior ties and asset specificity are not as strong as expected and the impact of safeguards on trust is not well understood. Overall, theoretical trust research has outpaced empirical research by far and promising opportunities for future empirical research exist.

Past research on how opportunism in buyer-supplier relationships can be mitigated remains incomplete and often contradictory. Applying recent advances in qualitative comparative analysis to a sample of 137 buyer-supplier relationships in the German automotive industry, we show that there are multiple equifinal pathways to high and low opportunism. In general, our study shows that it is easier to avoid high opportunism than to consistently achieve low opportunism. On this basis, we offer new insights into countering opportunism for researchers and managers. Achieving low opportunism requires a combination of governance mechanisms, which are generally not interchangeable. In particular, relational governance mechanisms in isolation seem to be more restricted than prior research has suggested but form a powerful synergistic combination with complex contracts. Although formal governance mechanisms lack enforceability, the coordination and monitoring that they provide are critical in both avoiding high opportunism and achieving low opportunism. Performance ambiguity is especially difficult to manage. Overall, our paper shows the power of configurational approaches and encourages the development of new theory that adopts a situational contingency perspective.