A Preliminary Investigation of the Effect of Social Media on Affective Trust in Customer-Supplier Relationships

Abstract

We present the preliminary results of an ongoing research aimed at investigating the role of social media in the process of trust building, with particular attention to the case of small-medium enterprises (SME). Our findings show that social media contribute to increase the affective trust more than traditional websites. This result suggests that social media have the potential to enhance the business of SMEs other than large companies, by fostering the affective commitment of customers

Investigating the Effect of Social Media on Trust Building in Customer-supplier Relationships

“…On the contrary, affective-based trust involves "one's emotional bonds and sincere concern for the wellbeing of the others" (Hung et al, 2004). Consistently with our previous research (Calefato et al, 2013), in this study we maintain the mapping of the four antecedents into the cognitive and affective appraisal mechanism, as suggested in (Schumann et al, 2012). Specifically, the ability and predictability dimensions are assessed by means of cognitive elaboration of personal and professional information.…”

“…In this paper, we investigate the role of social media on trust building in the very early stage of a customer-supplier relationship, i.e., based on the first impression provided by a company's online image. The study described in this paper extends a previous pilot experiment performed with 19 students with background on computer science (Calefato et al, 2013). The pilot study provided insights on how to improve the design of the experiment, with particular focus on the clear distinction between the information elements involved in the two web conditions (i.e.…”

“…For each trust antecedent, a set of questions was defined, by integrating guidelines and items included in questionnaires from studies about trust elicitation and perception based on first impression (Büttner and Göritz, 2008;Rusman, 2011;Rusman et al 2010). In our questionnaire (Calefato et al, 2013), we included 21 questions overall: 7 for ability and 3 for predictability (cognitive trust); 11 for benevolence (affective trust). The subjects were requested to evaluate the perceived trustworthiness of a given company by filling out the questionnaire based on Likert scale from 1 to 5.…”

The role of social media in affective trust building in customer–supplier relationships

“…With respect to the commercial domain, the envisaged model to adopt in our experiments is an extension of the 'tripod' model defined by Mayer et al [15], which is highly consistent with previous research in the same domain [1,2,18]. According to the tripod model, the trustworthiness of a person or organization is assessed in terms of ability, benevolence, and integrity.…”