Administrational Trust: An empirical examination of interorganisational trust and distrust in the Flemish administration

This dissertation focuses on interorganisational trust in the Flemish public administration, and is the result of a four-year research project in the framework of the Flemish Policy Research Centre - Governmental Organisation - Decisive Governance (2012-2015). The objectives of our research were threefold: 1) to define and identify interorganisational trust in the empirical reality of public administration, 2) to explain the mechanisms of interorganisational trust in the empirical reality of public administration, and 3) to contribute to the development of strategies to optimise interorganisational trust in the Flemish administration where such is possible and functional. We focused our research on interorganisational trust in the horizontal departments of the Flemish administration. On the basis of these objectives, the following research questions were specified for the project: 1) What is the role of interorganisational trust in a public administration context? (Exploratory) 2) What is the distribution of interorganisational trust in the Flemish administration? (Descriptive). 3) Which mechanisms explain interorganisational trust in the Flemish administration? (Explanatory) We defined interorganisational trust in public administration (administrational trust), as "a subjective evaluation made by boundary spanners in interorganisational interactions in public administration characterised by risk, dependency and uncertainty, comprising the intentional and behavioural willingness to suspend vulnerability, on the basis of positive expectations held about the counterpart organisation". We developed a four-phase 'funnel' mixed-method research design in which qualitative and quantitative exploratory, descriptive and explanatory methods were logically sequenced and integrated in order to answer these three questions. The first phase comprised desk research in order to construct the conceptual definitions and frameworks and to address the research questions in this project. In the second phase, an exploration of all three research questions was conducted in order to answer the exploratory research question, and get more acquainted with the empirical reality of interorganisational trust in the Flemish administration, in particular regarding prevalent trust problems in the Flemish administration, which highlighted interorganisational interactions with horizontal departments. In the third phase, an online survey was conducted, which focused on boundary spanners in i