Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management

4Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Global Collaborations

Thomas Tøth and Anne-Marie Søderberg

4.1 Introduction

Western companies’ outsourcing to emergent markets is increasingly being replaced by strategic partnerships that require close and trustful collaboration between clients and vendors. In this chapter we want to focus on inter-organisational boundary-spanning activities in the context of global information technology (IT) development projects.

We draw on our empirical studies of collaborative partnerships between Western clients and Indian vendors (Tøth 2015; Søderberg and Romani 2017) and focus on key boundary spanners “onsite” and “offshore” and their efforts in regard to developing and maintaining trustful and sustainable client-vendor ...