Organisational Trustworthiness: A Conceptual Framework and Scale Development

The issue of trust attracts significant attention within the literature but in a marketing sense, our understanding of the construct can be both varied and ambiguous. In addition to this, a gap exists in terms of our understanding of the notion of
trustworthiness which we propose is the antecedent of trust. However, given the ambiguity our lack of understanding of trustworthiness is not entirely surprising. Given trust’s accepted importance to relationship marketing, there appears to be a failure to develop a coherent framework to indicate trustworthiness. This is a void that this paper will help to address and by doing so, it will extend the body of knowledge by contributing to our understanding of the construct and its attributes.