Defining Trust in a B2B Relationship - The SMEs’ Perspective

Trust’s role in underpinning long-term business relationships is well established, albeit with a range of associated definitions and structures. This paper presents an instrument to assess the structure and level of SMEs’ trust-perception of their banks in Nigeria, which represents an area with limited research to date. Various scale sets from existing studies are combined to assess the credibility and benevolence aspects of trust. Data were collected from 199 SMEs via interviews with owners or senior managers. Analysis involved Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to determine the underlying data structure, with subsequent deployment of Cronbach’s alpha to assess the internal reliability of the retained factors. For the context of this study, trust primarily encompasses credibility, with only a marginal presence of benevolence. Interestingly, despite the financial crises that have plagued the banking industry in Nigeria, SMEs still have considerable a positive trust-disposition towards their banks. The originality of this work lies in the investigation of a particular B2B relationship within an under researched business setting.