Trust Facilitating Good Software Outsourcing Relationships

Offshore outsourcing and teams working across national borders have become a fact. Management experiences difficulties when applying traditional management approaches, because of the increased complexity of global organizations and global partnerships and their dependency on people with different underlying norms, values and beliefs. Cultural sensitivity is a core issue. Trust, an issue embedded in culture, is utmost important for global organizations and global outsourcing partnerships. In this paper we investigate the phenomenon of trust by analyzing the characteristics, their interconnection and identification in the software outsourcing context. Our findings reveal the importance of trust in software outsourcing relationships and the recognition that trust is culture bound and therefore prompts for special caution and cultural awareness. The advantages gained in outsourcing relationships which could demonstrate trust between partners were improved communication, efficiency and output of Information Systems (IS) development projects, as well as mitigation of opportunistic behavior.