Is Trust Shapeable? Design Requirements for Governing Sharing Networks.

Driven by digitization and the accompanying attempt to compensate for a lack of resources and capabilities, the number of inter-organizational collab-orations in which resources are shared increases rapidly. The individual actors within such sharing networks (SN) form the foundation for the success of these collaborations. Successful collaborations have a high level of trust between these individual actors. However, it is still unclear how to design roles and relationships in networks in order to develop and foster trust. Thus far, scholars have done very little research investigating the relationship between structural properties of sharing network configurations and trust within them. By applying design science research (DSR), this study intends to shed light on design requirements (DR) to govern successful SN. We describe the review’s findings as four meta-requirements, which set the cornerstone for our journey toward a holistic information systems (IS) design theory aimed at shaping roles and relationships to govern SN effectively.