Building Trust in Multi-stakeholder Partnerships: Critical Emotional Incidents and Practices of Engagement

Case selection

The theoretical sampling (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007) involved in the selection of this case was informed by three main considerations. First, this initiative represented an attempt to build a partnership involving multiple stakeholders with differing interests. MC’s overarching objective was to ensure steady access to skilled workers, the Aboriginal partners wanted to develop employment opportunities for their communities, and the federal and provincial governments had public policy goals to enhance Aboriginal economic development. Second, the partnership took place within a context of historically difficult relationships, where the partners had little prior personal interaction with one another. Given legacies of mistrust among the partners (Whiteman, 2009), this case represents a revelatory, extreme exemplar (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007; Yin, 1994) for studying the development and performance of a multi-stakeholder partnership, thereby holding the potential to reveal aspects of the phenomenon that might otherwise not be readily apparent (Murphy & Arenas, 2010). Finally, one of the co-authors gained privileged access to the development of this partnership and collected rich process data throughout its formation and development. The nature and extent of this access provided an exceptional opportunity to witness the interaction of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples as they pursued mutually beneficial goals. We note, however, that given the difficulties associated with similar partnerships elsewhere (e.g. Eden & Huxham, 2001), the success or failure of the initiative was highly uncertain as we embarked on this study.

Data sources

Our study combines three main sources of data: extensive participant observation over a six-year period, 11 semi-structured interviews with participants from each partner organization, and a three-hour video-taped group discussion involving three of the main partners.

The access granted to one of the co-authors as a participant-observer (Jorgensen, 1989) began with periodic contacts with government and MC officials during the partnership’s initial planning stages. During this study period, she was able to follow and assess its original intentions, become familiar with the proposed approach for implementing the partnership, and gain insight into the concerns of these partners. In September 2004, she was invited to join the first meeting of the newly established advisory council, where she met its members. Thereafter, she attended all nine subsequent meetings of the advisory council between 2004 and 2007. Each of these meetings lasted one full day, and was held either in a hotel meeting room or at one of the MC sites. At least one individual from each partner organization attended every advisory council meeting. The participant observation data were collected not only during discussions related to the formal agenda, but also during more informal interactions among the members at lunch or during breaks. This co-author took extensive notes during the meetings and compiled written materials related to the partnership. In addition, she regularly contacted participants on a more informal basis outside the meeting setting to explore the climate and development of the partnership as it evolved. Her field notes documented not only the substantive activities of the partnership and its progress, but also the practices and behaviours exhibited by partners during their interactions, along with her personal impressions. In total, over 500 pages of field notes and related documentation (including meeting agendas, meeting minutes, management guides and templates, plans, PowerPoint presentations, monitoring reports, progress reports, descriptions of partnership initiatives, etc.) were generated.

These data were supplemented by 11 semi-structured interviews conducted by both authors together in early 2007. Four individuals from MC were interviewed, as were one from each of the two government partners, and five individuals representing the four Aboriginal partner organizations. The interviews were used to verify and expand understandings drawn from the participant observation data, and to explore emergent theoretical categorizations. The interviews varied from one to three hours in length, and covered the participant’s involvement in the partnership and his or her impressions of it. They were conducted in a location chosen by the interviewee, and included MC facilities, government offices, Aboriginal community offices, and hotel meeting rooms. We used a standard protocol to guide the process, but left time for open-ended identification of issues by informants. (We elaborate on the content and development of this protocol below.) All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed in full, producing 358 pages of transcripts.

Finally, we organized a three-hour group discussion with three of the most actively involved partners (one from MC, one from government, and one Aboriginal community officer) in the context of a course on corporate social responsibility in August 2009. At this group discussion, each participant introduced himself and then responded to questions from students and the authors concerning the partnership’s development. While acknowledging the potential limitations of collecting data in such a setting, we found that the partners were able to prompt each other’s memories about key points in the partnership’s development and, in many cases, articulated new reflections on key moments of its evolution. We thus retained this data in the spirit of triangulation with the earlier-collected participant-observer and interview data. The session was video-recorded and the audio portion was fully transcribed, producing 48 pages of transcript. The visual record of the session provided us with further non-verbal evidence of how the partners interacted with one another.

Methods

Consistent with case study methods (Eisenhardt, 1989; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007) we iterated between the case data, emerging theory, and existing literature. We conducted our analysis and theory-building in three linked phases.

The first phase involved using the participant-observer data to put together an initial chronology of the partnership, identifying key activities, events, and milestones. This timeline was subsequently refined by both authors as further data were collected through the interviews and group discussion, and the partners had the opportunity to review and clarify our interpretations. Concurrently, the participant-observer co-author prepared a preliminary analysis of field notes, focusing on how the behaviours and interactions of the partners had evolved over time. We used these to begin generating emergent theoretical constructs and to prepare an interview protocol that would enable us to explore the emerging constructs more systematically. One of our early insights was that the evolution of the partnership had not always been linear or smooth, and that it had been periodically marked by challenging moments – a finding consistent with prior research on multi-stakeholder partnerships (Eden & Huxham, 2001; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009). The protocol (presented in the Appendix) included questions probing informants’ perceptions about the evolution and effectiveness of the partnership, including any incidents that they viewed as important.

The second phase started with an analysis of the interview data. Four key turning points (centred on incidents) were widely described by informants as critical to advancement of the MC partnership as a whole. These four incidents became a focal point of the data analysis, and we noted that each one was characterized by high emotional content (George, 2000). Drawing together relevant participant observation field notes along with the interview transcripts and video data, we developed a detailed narrative construction to chronicle each of these four incidents (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004). Participant observations provided data relating to the substantive issues being addressed during the incident, as well as to the physical behaviours of members, such as facial expressions and body language (e.g. looking down, sweating) associated with emotions (Chen & Drummond, 2008; Flack, 2006; Stouten & de Cremer, 2010). The interviews and video data offered verbal insights from informants into the emotional reactions that were both felt by themselves and attributed to other members during the partnership process. Together, the observations, interviews and video provided a contextually rich set of information about the specific emotions and their sources (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004). We used the detailed narrative constructions to analyse the nature of each incident’s emotional content as well as the practices or actions – both routine and improvised (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011) – engaged in by the partners. We summarize each narrative construction in the form of shorter incident ‘vignettes’ presented in the findings section, highlighting the most salient emotions and practices.

We used two main approaches in analysing the emotional content of the detailed narrative constructions. We began by identifying expressions of emotional content in the empirical material and coding them using the list of emotions in the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) (Watson, Clark,& Tellegen, 1988). This preliminary effort provided us with an initial understanding of the emotions expressed during the incidents, although we found it did not fully capture the dynamic nature of the emotionality of each incident. In particular, it did not show the sequences of positive and/or negative emotions in emotional episodes (Waldron & Krone, 1991). To deepen our analysis, we then drew on broader categorizations of emotional valence, i.e. either positive or negative, following studies by Stam and Stanton (2010), Stouten and de Cremer (2010), Waldron and Krone (1991), and Watson et al. (1988). Examples of emotions having positive valence suggestive of feelings of well-being include enthusiasm, excitement, and pride (Watson et al., 1988), whereas negative emotions reflect intense unpleasant feelings (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004), and include fear, shame, anxiety, and anger (Watson et al., 1988). In the spirit of triangulation, we then recoded the detailed narrative constructions according to their dominant major valence over the course of each incident. The resulting analysis highlighted both the fine-grained emotions expressed at various points during the incidents and the flow of positive and negative emotionality throughout. We present both the dominant valence codes and the more fine-grained PANAS codes in our findings section.

We approached our analysis of the emotional engagement practices inductively, based on open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Because practices are entangled and interrelated elements of activity (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009), we began by re-examining the empirical material and coding both the textual and observational (behavioural) data for each incident. Consistent with our approach for coding emotions, we also paid attention to sequences of activities engaged in by the partners in coding the practices. As our data analysis progressed, we cycled back and forth between theory and data, consolidating our preliminary open codes into empirical categories (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

The final phase of our analysis centred on sharpening our understanding of the characteristics of the incidents, by uncovering patterns and situating them within the evolution of the partnership. Following Eisenhardt (1989), we iterated between our case data and pertinent literature to refine our constructs and develop our emergent theory on the micro-dynamics of the development of trust within a multi-stakeholder partnership.

Case overview

The case study covers a period of six years – from 2001 to 2007 (see Table 1 for a timeline of key milestones). In the next section, we will provide a brief overview of the case study, followed by our findings.

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Table 1.

Timeline and Milestones for MC Partnership with Indigenous People.

Date	Milestone	Description	Significance
Late 2001	First contact between MC and Aboriginal organization	MC human resource manager contacts officer in one Aboriginal organization	Preliminary discussion about the form the initiative might take. Identification of key government contacts with mandates to pursue partnership arrangements
December 2002	First contact with government partners	Government officials visit MC facilities to discuss partnership	Future partners get to know one another and discuss potential for collaboration
Winter 2003	Meeting with MC senior management	Government officials present framework for partnership to senior management	Concerns about purpose and value of the partnership are raised. Pockets of resistance in MC management are evident
March 2003	Work begins on formal partnership agreement	Meetings with Aboriginal organizations to test partnership concept, define nature and scope of activity	Senior management backing for the partnership in place. MC goes public with its commitment to partnership. Roles and responsibilities negotiated.
November 2003	Partnership signing ceremony	Public ceremony with important dignitaries and media coverage	One Aboriginal signatory fails to appear due to an unrelated dispute with the government. The signing proceeds after discussion
November 2003–January 2004	Implementation and information gathering begin	Some increase in the number of job applicants but no increase in hiring	MC human resources manager is concerned about lack of results. Analysis shows that Aboriginal applicants are being screened out
January 2004	Workshop to explain recruitment process	MC organizes a workshop with representatives of every Aboriginal community in the province to explain their recruitment processes	Aboriginal representatives identify systemic barriers in recruitment, including experience requirements, testing and interviewing processes
January–June 2004	Little progress: MC manager seeks advice	MC human resources manager expresses concern about lack of progress; seeks advice on establishing an advisory council	An advisory council was a recommended component of the partnership process, yet not implemented due to MC manager’s concern about losing control
June 2004	Decision to establish advisory council	MC manager decides to establish council	Invitations are extended to all partners. Every partner agrees to participate. Four additional MC managers become members of the council
September 2004	First advisory council meeting	One-day event in a local hotel. Agenda focuses on planning future actions	First time the partners met as a group since the signing ceremony nearly one year earlier. Climate of caution and scepticism
September 2004–April 2005	Implementation intensifies	Series of initiatives, including skills upgrading pilot project, commenced	Results of pilot project used to revamp MC recruitment process. Advisory council members provide knowledge and networks in this process
April 2005	Advisory council meeting; question of racism raised	Regular meeting of the council, where one Aboriginal member adds an agenda item on workplace climate	Question opens discussion on racism, a highly charged issue that has historically been a significant barrier to Aboriginal employment
September 2005	Advisory council meeting; question of Aboriginal education raised	At a regular council meeting an MC manager asks a rhetorical question on why education is a problem for Aboriginal people	Discussion returns to racism and systemic barriers in the education system. Council makes decision to add education to its agenda
September 2005–April 2007	Expanded activities initiated	Actions expand to a number of fronts, including education	New partners brought into the process, including education officials. Other new initiatives added, including mentoring
April 2007	Representative workforce attained	MC reports that goal of representative workforce has been achieved	One of the key strategic goals of the partnership has been attained

The first steps towards partnership were taken by MC’s senior human resources manager in 2001, when he contacted a person he knew in an Aboriginal community to explore new ways to improve the prospects for increasing Aboriginal representation in MC’s workforce. As an Aboriginal employment development officer, she was open to this idea, despite MC’s reputation for being a difficult place for Aboriginal people to work. She encouraged him to get in touch with one of her contacts in the federal government to explore a new government initiative to increase partnership between the corporate sector and Aboriginal organizations. The MC manager did this, ultimately inviting the federal official to visit MC’s facilities and discuss the potential for working together. As discussions progressed, the two managers presented the idea for a multi-stakeholder partnership to address MC’s strategic human resource needs to the company’s senior management. A number of MC’s managers were initially sceptical about the value and wisdom of this partnership, with some expressing disagreement or outright hostility. This meeting would foreshadow many of the challenges the partners would face, stemming in particular from differing cultural traditions and values, longstanding legacies of racism, mistrust and disappointment on both sides, and poor Aboriginal labour market experience.

Ultimately, the senior MC human resources manager was able to make a convincing business case for securing a long-term workforce through partnership with Aboriginal people, and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was negotiated involving MC, three Aboriginal organizations (a fourth joined subsequently) and two levels of government. The overarching goal was to increase the representation of Aboriginal peoples in the MC workforce and supplier base. In November 2003, the partners made a formal commitment to develop a partnership at a public signing ceremony, and the implementation of the partnership began in earnest. The federal government provided MC with a written implementation guide that outlined the specific steps to follow. The guide included templates for conducting various activities and numerous checklists. However, despite the visibility of the signing ceremony, the availability of prescriptive tools such as the guide, and the internal efforts of MC managers, progress in hiring new Aboriginal employees was slow. Aside from one workshop developed by the MC manager to explain the company’s recruitment process in more detail to Aboriginal employment officers, progress with the partnership stalled.

By mid-2004, more than six months after signing the partnership agreement, the MC human resources manager finally decided to create an advisory council comprising representatives of all signatories to the MOU. He explained his long hesitation in doing this as concern about losing control of the process, stating that he ‘did not want someone telling me what to do’. Ultimately, he overcame his trepidation after speaking with several of his new partners from Aboriginal organizations, recalling: ‘We didn’t know what we were getting into and I wasn’t sure where it would go. Frankly, it was a leap of faith.’

At the first meeting of the new advisory council, the agenda focused on defining a work plan for the coming months, as well as discussing a pilot programme to prepare Aboriginal candidates for MC’s recruitment process. The council also decided to meet three or four times a year. Agendas were set in advance (with input from all of the partners) and at each meeting there was a report by MC on its key metrics – the number of job applicants, the number of hires, and the degree to which MC’s workforce was representative of the local Aboriginal labour market. Over time, the initiatives pursued by the council widened to include issues not originally contemplated in the partnership agreement, such as systemic barriers to Aboriginal employment in the education system.

By April 2007, the partnership was widely considered to have been ‘successful’: the company attained its initial goal of matching its percentage of Aboriginal employees to their representation in the labour market; all Aboriginal informants agreed that the partnership had contributed to a reduction in longstanding barriers to employment including racism; and the partnership was used as a model for others that were developed in several other economic sectors of this province. At the time of writing, the partnership was still in effect.

Critical emotional incidents

The MC partnership did not advance smoothly through its stages of development. Instead, it followed a discontinuous path, punctuated by unexpected, emotionally laden events. Although these events held the potential to distract participants and provoke outright failure, our analysis revealed that they ultimately fulfilled an important role in trust-building among the partners. Four such events were described by partners as key turning points critical to the success or failure of the MC partnership as a whole. Each was characterized by emotional content, that is, high intensity feelings triggered by specific stimuli that demand attention and interrupt cognitive processes and behaviours (George, 2000). Building on the well-established concept of a ‘critical incident’ (Chell, 1998; Flanagan, 1954) we refer to these as critical emotional incidents.

Critical incidents tend to mark significant turning points or changes in the life of a person, institution or social phenomenon (Tripp, 1993). They are often unplanned, unanticipated, and uncontrolled, and their criticality can usually only be recognized after the consequences of the incident are known (Angelides, 2001). Due to the high level of emotionality in the critical incidents in the MC partnership – which made them particularly poignant for the individuals involved – we call them ‘critical emotional incidents’. We describe the criticality and emotionality of each of these incidents in Table 2, and illustrate them more fully in the contextualized vignettes below.

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Table 2.

Critical Emotional Incidents and their Emotionality.

Context: date/setting	Incident/ initiator	Criticality	Initial emotions (negative)	Illustrative quotes	Subsequent emotions (positive)	Illustrative quotes
Nov. 2003Hotel ballroom	Signing the agreement/ MC partner	Formal agreement perceived as essential step in initiating partnership.High-profile public setting with media and press present, and no backup plan in place	AnxietyNervousnessFear	MC manager 1: “We had probably 60 or 70 people in the room with a high stake in this. And the Aboriginal community was looking at us as to say: ‘Is this going to work?’” [Anxiety] [Fear]	InspiredAttentiveDeterminedConfident	MC manager 1: “He looked at both of us, he knew exactly what was going on. It was unbelievable. He’s got guts.” [Inspired] [Attentive]
				Aboriginal partner 1: “I felt kind of odd when they asked me if I would represent the (Aboriginal organization). I said ‘if I can I would no problem.’ I’m very shy and under pressure I start sweating, I start getting nervous.” [Nervousness] [Fear]		Aboriginal partner 1: “MC held out their hand and said ‘what can we do to change things’. Creating the partnership is one of the ways they did that.” [Determined] [Confident]
Jan. 2004Aboriginal community	Employment barriers in MC’s job interview protocol/ Aboriginal partner	Disrupted a planned presentation by MC in a public setting.Revealed ignorance of MC managers about barriers to employment, and called into question their ability to change	HostilityIrritability ShameGuilt	MC manager 2: “There was hostility in the audience during our presentation.” [Hostility] [Irritability]	StrongInspiredDetermined	Government partner 1: “You have to admire MC for standing up there and taking it on the chin for something that wasn’t their fault.” [Strong] [Inspired]
				MC manager 1: “We learned that we were discriminating and didn’t know it. At this point it was hugely embarrassing to me. … I’ll never forget it.” [Shame] [Guilt]		Aboriginal partner 5: “MC was willing to sit down at a round table with us and really talk to grassroots people.” [Inspired] [Determined]
April 2005Hotel meeting room	Dealing with racism in the workplace/Aboriginal partner	Implied that racism existed within MC workplace.Willingness to continue with partnership contingent on answer	AngryUpsetShame	Aboriginal partner 2: “When I heard the question, I just looked at [the MC manager] and I’m thinking ‘I hope he has absorbed exactly what [the Aboriginal partner] is trying to say’.” [Upset]	AttentiveConfidentInspired	Aboriginal partner 2: “You knew the minute [the MC manager] responded that right from the bottom of his heart was sincere.” [Attentive] [Confident]
				MC manager 1: “The acceptance of diversity is limited with some people on the shop floor, but I didn’t realize that it was also true for some of our supervisors. I found out that out when I initially proposed the partnership and I was shocked and angry.” [Angry] [Shame]		Aboriginal partner 1: “It showed me that his word was worth more than the paper it was written on. Really it came from the heart … that’s what I’m trying to say.” [Inspired]
Sept. 2005MC facilities	Problems with education/MC partner	Revealed ignorance of non-Aboriginal members about barriers in the education system.Ability to advance with partnership contingent on MC managers’ capacity to understand this situation	SadnessAngerShame	Aboriginal partner 2: “When I answered him. I talked about racism in the schools. I talked about teachers pushing our kids through so that they’re out of the school system. I talked about guidance counsellors telling Aboriginal students ‘why are you bothering to fill out that application?’ … It’s still happening. And that’s how we got on another whole topic, that of education.” [Sadness] [Anger]	AttentiveDeterminedInspiredPride	MC manager 1: “Much of what we see and try to do in our white society is intellectual, it’s cerebral. Until you actually either experience it yourself or hear from someone relating an experience, you just can’t feel it in your gut. But we did in that meeting, talking about education.” [Attentive] [Determined)
				MC manager 2: “When we started talking about challenges Aboriginal people faced in education, people really opened up. It was certainly an eye-opener.” [Sadness] [Shame]		Aboriginal partner 2: “We got a really positive reaction from it so, trying to heal those scars. In committees like this we can feel comfortable to discussing those things … That’s what makes the partnership.” [Inspired] [Pride]

Each critical emotional incident was spontaneously and independently identified as critical by two or more partners during the course of our data collection. The incidents occurred in a variety of circumstances and were triggered by different issues and individuals, but all were unplanned, uncontrolled, and highly emotional for the people involved. We observed that the critical emotional incidents were characterized by multiple emotions, including those with both negative and positive valence, occurring in a sequence over time. Emotions with negative valence, including fear, anxiety, and shame, were dominant in at the onset of these incidents, while those with a positive valence were evident subsequently. Because negative emotions can irreparably damage relationships (Waldron & Krone, 1991) or become toxic for organizational decision-making (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004), there was a very real potential for these highly charged emotional incidents to damage or destroy the partnership. The transformation of the negative emotions into positive ones (as we outline in the section below on emotional engagement practices) contributed to their identification by partners as turning points in the way they interacted with and trusted one another. We now turn to present brief ‘vignettes’ describing each critical emotional incident.

Emotional engagement practices

This section focuses on the practices partners used to handle the critical emotional incidents. We identified a set of four emotional engagement practices that occurred during each incident: asking provocative questions; offering sensitive disclosures; opening the agenda to pursue spontaneous ideas; and valuing the other in attitudes and acts. Although we also observed these practices at other points during the study period, this sequence of practices was particularly evident during the playing out of the critical emotional incidents.

We conceive of emotional engagement practices as a specific form of relational practice (Dutton & Dukerich, 2006) related to connecting to others on an emotional level. More specifically, we define emotional engagement practices as practices that impact the emotional valence of the partnership by stimulating a personal engagement with other participants and partnership tasks. This definition builds on earlier studies of personal engagement in work role performance, which relates to ways people tie their individual selves to their work roles by expressing themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally through task behaviours (Kahn, 1990). We suggest that emotional engagement practices are distinct from the more traditional relational activities and practices identified in the stakeholder partnership literature emphasizing trustworthiness and the expectation of predictable, reliable behaviour of one party by another (Tomlinson, 2005), such as sharing information and communicating effectively (Murphy & Arenas, 2010). Rather, they appeared to be based on a more unpredictable logic for trust-building: one in which weaknesses are exposed, vulnerability embraced, and leaps of faith taken.

We thus see the chief role of emotional engagement practices as stimulating the flow of positive and negative emotions among the people involved in the partnership in ways that increase their involvement and participation. Evidence related to these practices has been presented in the vignettes of the critical incidents. In Table 3 and in the detailed descriptions below, we further describe the impact of the practices on both emotions and trust.

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Table 3.

Impact of Emotional Engagement Practices on Partner Emotions and Trust.

Emotional engagement practice	Impact on emotions	Illustrative quotes	Impact on trust	Illustrative quotes
Asking provocative questions	Predominantly negative, initially. These questions were often asked out of frustration, and surprised and upset others	Aboriginal partner 1: “Questions are asked at the Advisory Council where they wouldn’t be asked in any other setting because they would offend somebody. Like some related to very touchy issues like fishing, forestry, taxation.”	Ultimately beneficial. Surfaced unresolved emotional issues, and provided opportunity for partners to demonstrate integrity	MC manager 1: “If I look at ‘how did we get to where we got to?’ it was through probing and questions. Then it became relationship-based. … They really started believing that we were committed…and our partners started working with us on a serious basis to say ‘what can we do to help?’”
Offering sensitive disclosures	Predominantly negative, initially. Involved revealing personal vulnerabilities, potentially distressing for disclosers. Often incited guilt or shame in partners	Government partner 2: “It’s very clear that people around that table trust one another to the point that they’ve shared personal, deep kind of personal experiences that you don’t normally get at a meeting like that.”	Ultimately beneficial. By exposing vulnerabilities, partners were able to move beyond surface understandings to develop empathetic and benevolent bonds	Aboriginal partner 1: “When you’re in that room you have so much comfort and trust that you can say anything, you can, you can express your views without reprisals … that’s what a lot of people are scared of. They don’t want to say anything because it might come back to you and it might cost you your job, it might cost your status or credibility … There’s a lot of things that can go wrong. When I’m in that room I’m not scared.”
Opening the agenda to pursue spontaneous ideas	Predominantly positive, subsequently. Enthusiasm generated due to opportunity for self-expression and the discussion of unexpected yet salient topics	Government partner 1: “Don’t be afraid of what may be a crazy idea or a crazy direction, you know, or an unimaginable process. The biggest thing was the education part … Holy cow! Where did that come from? What a good idea!”	Ultimately beneficial. The creation of a safe environment allowed partners to take risks and demonstrate integrity and benevolence	MC manager 1: “If they said ‘we need to go in a different direction, you need to have a different focus’ then I did. It was clear to me that they had a lot of wisdom and I trusted their guidance. And so we followed it. I think that helped a lot.”
Valuing the other in attitudes and acts	Predominantly positive, subsequently. By demonstrating interest in and attentiveness to others, fostered positive emotions such as enthusiasm and pride	Aboriginal partner 3: “I have never seen such an enthusiastic group … when we get together it’s just such a pleasant working group we just have a good working relationship … we have respect for each other and we don’t talk over anybody and we don’t talk down or up to anybody, we’re all on the same playing field as a player, as a partner. I think that’s a big part of the success to this is that everybody has got input, everything is acted upon and follow up is done on it.”	Ultimately beneficial. By developing deeper knowledge of partners, a candid mutual respect and understanding was developed	Aboriginal partner 1: “You get to know a person. You have to be able to read that person, you have to hear from eyes and see from his lips… The look he gave me I knew he was serious.”

Critical emotional incidents, emotional engagement practices and trust-building: A model

We now integrate our findings to develop a model of trust-building in multi-stakeholder partnerships. We propose that critical emotional incidents can unexpectedly punctuate the more rationally oriented process of partnership development, evoking negative emotions among partners. We further suggest that specific emotional engagement practices can transform negative emotions into positive ones, thereby contributing to a dynamic cycle of trust-building that leads to the expansion of partnership objectives. Our model is depicted in Figure 1, and described in more detail below.

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Figure 1.

Critical Emotional Incidents, Emotional Engagement Practices and Trust-Building in Multi-stakeholder Partnerships.

The partnership process was initiated with broad agreement among partners based on the strategic objective of increasing Aboriginal employment at MC. This shared objective was complemented by formalized partnership guidelines to formulate and implement the partnership agreement that established roles and responsibilities, set clear meeting agendas, and instituted metrics. These practices were important to establishing control and building competence-based trust, as they enabled partners to see that their counterparts could deliver on their commitments and demonstrate their abilities, one of three antecedents to trust-building (Mayer et al., 1995).

We agree on actions and we get them done before that date. So that the next meeting we can report on what success we’ve had. And success builds success. And people start to say: ‘Ok, they said they will do this and they did it.’ That’s what builds trust. And the easiest way to lose trust is to not do what you said you’re going to do. (MC Manager 1)

However, at several points in the partnership process, these goal-oriented and largely rational practices were interrupted. On four key occasions, a partner chose to ask a provocative question that incited a critical emotional incident, which brought to the surface differences and tensions that had previously been set aside (but not forgotten) in the interest of establishing a partnership. The triggering of the critical emotional incident led other partners to engage in other emotional engagement practices, which initially amplified the negative emotions but ultimately stimulated positive emotions. At all points during the incidents, partners could have chosen not to react, or to speak. The fact that they chose to engage in this sequence of practices carried risks, and demonstrated an orientation toward increasing personal vulnerability through emotional engagement rather than partnership control. Each iteration of this sequence of emotional engagement practices afforded partners opportunities to demonstrate benevolence and integrity, two key antecedents to trust (Mayer et al., 1995).

As the partners began trusting each other to a greater degree following each incident, they began to take still more risks, which resulted in a broadening of the original partnership objectives to address a wider range of concerns. The improved trust developed during the first incident at the signing ceremony got the partnership off the ground. The second incident led the partners to focus on eliminating barriers to workplace employment. The third incident resulted in their decision to address racism in the workplace, while the fourth resulted in adding a new focus on longstanding problems in the education system.

We should note that these emotional engagement practices did not eliminate the rational partnership practices. However, participants identified the emotional engagement practices as particularly critical to trust development in the MC partnership. As one partner explained:

It takes a while before they’ll say ‘I think you could do some things differently.’ But it’s been hugely valuable to us when they have. I think some of it is establishing enough trust to talk to us about things that we can improve upon. In any company, if you’re going to get better that’s what you need. (MC partner 1)

The partnership continued to unfold this way over time, following paths of both rational and emotional engagement practices as they moved through critical emotional incidents, ultimately leading to increasing levels of trust.

Trust-building in multi-stakeholder partnerships

In investigating the micro-foundations of trust-building, our aim has been to shed light on a critical gap in the multi-stakeholder partnership literature. Prior studies have acknowledged that trust is a key to partnership success (Bryson et al., 2006; Selsky & Parker, 2005; Vangen & Huxham, 2003a; Waddock, 1988) – and that it can be particularly difficult to develop in the context of multi-stakeholder partnerships because of social group differences (Googins & Rochlin, 2000; Murphy & Arenas, 2010, Waddock, 1988), negative prior experiences (Mandell & Steelman, 2003), and power imbalances (Berger et al., 2004; Tomlinson, 2005, Vangen & Huxham, 2003a). However, most scholarship to date has overlooked the individual characteristics and interpersonal dynamics (Felin & Foss, 2005) that provide the foundations for trust (Rousseau et al., 1998; Weber et al., 2005). Our longitudinal, empirically based interpretive case study helps to address this gap.

Our evidence confirms that trust has both cognitive and affective dimensions (McAllister, 1995; McEvily, 2011; Weber et al., 2005; Williams, 2001), and that a certain amount of cognitive trust is necessary before affective trust can develop (McAllister, 1995). Additionally, our findings support Williams’ (2001) observation that social group differences among people influence how they feel about each other, and historical legacies can both have an impact on affect-based trust. Our methodology of studying trust in a situation of extreme differences has helped us gain a better understandings of the trust-building phenomenon, which might otherwise not have been apparent (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007; Murphy & Arenas, 2010). At the same time, while we agree that the two forms of trust have distinct foundations – with cognitive-based trust based on rational judgements of another person (McAllister, 1995; Weber et al., 2005) such as trustworthiness (Mayer et al., 1995; Tomlinson, 2005), and affect-based trust reflecting the emotions and feelings that people have for one another (McAllister, 1995; Williams, 2001) – we hesitate to categorize them as polar opposites (McEvily, 2011). Our model is suggestive of a ‘hybrid’ form of trust (McEvily, 2011), in which both cognitive and affective trust are connected and developed through a dynamic process.

While trust is frequently studied through quantitative analysis aimed at hypothesis testing (Möllering, Bachmann & Lee, 2004, p. 560), our qualitative, longitudinal, case study approach enabled us to identify and refine the constructs associated with trust-building, and to develop the linkages among them, thus responding to calls in the literature for understanding trust development over time (Lewicki et al., 2006). The model of trust development that we propose links emotions, emotional engagement practices, and trust-building, and helps to explain not only how trust is developed, but also to account for the flow and discontinuities that occur in a partnership process. As such, we believe the finely grained perspective on trust development proposed in our model – that explicitly includes trust as a valuable outcome – provides a useful counterpoint to other models of partnerships and collaboration that see trust as a partnership attribute or antecedent (Mohr & Spekman, 1994) or external to the process (Gray, 1989).

Our model also introduces an alternative, empirically grounded explanation for the ‘rational choice’ model, which argues that trust grows in a gradual ‘S-shaped’ curve as a result of deliberate, careful cognitive processing (Weber et al., 2005), or through more orderly stage models of trust development (Lewicki & Bunker, 1995). Our evidence reinforces the notion that when people engage in seemingly non-rational acts, the ‘curve’ of trust development can be steep and accelerated (Weber et al., 2005). Our empirical evidence further suggests that these rapid moments of trust-building occur episodically, and that the trajectory of trust development is a series of accelerated curves that ultimately lead to high levels of trust. As such, the model provides a starting point for further examinations of processes and patterns of trust development not only in partnerships but also in other organizational contexts, ideally using longitudinal approaches.

Our attention to the complex relations and dynamics between individuals places greater emphasis on interpersonal trust. In doing so, we adopt a different point of departure from the majority of scholarship on multi-stakeholder partnerships (Tomlinson, 2005; Vangen & Huxham, 2003a; Waddock, 1988) and interorganizational collaborations (Das & Teng, 2001; Inkpen & Currall, 2004), which focus on the development of organizational trust and the interplay between trust and control. In doing so, we do not mean to suggest that organizational controls are unimportant in the partnership process. Indeed, we found that many of the organizational practices used in the MC partnership provided direction and control to the partnership, minimized risks (Das & Teng, 2001), and helped provide the foundations for organizational stability and survival (Inkpen & Currall, 2004). Rather, our evidence leads us to suggest that interpersonal trust can lay the foundation for the development of interorganizational trust. Indeed, because the starting conditions for this partnership could be characterized as high in mistrust – which generally reduces opportunities for success (Vlaar, Van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2007) – trust needed to be developed on an interpersonal level before reducing the interorganizational distrust prevalent at the start of the partnership.

Emotions and critical emotional incidents in trust-building

This study also highlights the crucial role that emotions can play in a multi-stakeholder partnership. It draws attention to the tensions endemic in partnerships (Eden & Huxham, 2001) and shows how negative episodes (Eden & Huxham, 2001; Seitanidi & Crane, 2009) can threaten or compromise the prospects for partnership success. Specifically, our evidence reveals that the MC partnership was punctuated by noteworthy discontinuities which held the potential to derail the partnership because of the intense, usually negative, emotions that were provoked. We offer an in-depth understanding of the nature and dynamics of these ‘critical emotional incidents’, as well as suggesting how they contribute to the process of trust-building.

Critical emotional incidents, like ‘critical incidents’ (e.g. Chell, 1998), are unexpected and highly significant events. However, unlike critical incidents involving cognitive tasks – such as handling crises on a flight deck (Flanagan, 1954) – the unexpected, significant incidents that arise in relationship-based activities such as trust-building have emotional as well as cognitive content. The intense emotional feelings during these incidents demanded attention and interrupted cognitive processes and behaviours (George, 2000). This emotional content contributed to their being seen as major turning points around which individuals constructed meaning in this emerging partnership. Against the background of partner mistrust, these incidents initially posed threats to trust-building as their uncontrolled and highly personal nature caused the potential for identity damage (Williams, 2007). Ultimately, however, they served a useful purpose by affording opportunities for individuals to deepen their understanding and trust of each other.

We were struck by the importance of emotional expression – both negative and positive – in the development of trust in this partnership. In some respects, this is to be expected. Emotions play an important role in organizational settings because of their ability to influence social interactions and cooperative behaviour (Stouten & de Cremer, 2010; Williams, 2007). More surprising, however, is the importance of expressing negative emotions, which have been linked to signals of broken trust (Jones & George, 1998) or to the creation of a toxic environment for organizational decision-making (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004). While the regulation of emotions may facilitate work-related relationships (Waldron & Krone, 1991) and the building of trust in some contexts (Williams, 2007), our evidence suggests that the expression of negative emotions served a beneficial purpose in the MC partnership. The negative emotions that occurred within the critical emotional incidents served to test partner commitment to the partnership and especially to each other, and created the context for partners to shift from incremental stage-based processes of trust development (e.g. Lewicki & Bunker, 1995) and take ‘leaps of faith’. Had the negative emotions been suppressed, we speculate that the resultant festering, unresolved feelings could have negatively affected the quality of interactions (Waldron & Krone, 1991). This point merits further attention, especially in partnerships that have failed.

In this partnership, each incident that we examined was followed by intense relationship work that converted the negative emotions experienced by partners to more positive ones, consolidating the growing connection and trust between the partners. Once the incident and its aftermath had passed, the partners largely returned to the more rationalistic practices that predominated pre-incident. Thus, both cognitive and affect-based practices appeared to contribute to trust development, with more cognitive-based aspects of trust developing through stable interactions among individuals, while more affect-based elements of trust advanced most quickly during uncontrolled interactions. The latter point may be particularly salient when partners are highly dissimilar and less spontaneously disposed to positive beliefs and feelings (Williams, 2001). Our punctuated, discontinuous model of trust development complements studies focused on more continuous processes of trust development in a collaborative context, and provides further evidence for the importance of emotional factors in trust development in organizations more broadly (McAllister, 1995; Schoorman, Mayer & Davis, 2007; Williams, 2001, 2007).

Emotional engagement practices and trust-building

The emotional engagement practices that were exhibited during the critical emotional incidents clearly played a vital role in trust-building. Emotional engagement practices impact the emotional valence of a partnership by stimulating a personal engagement with the other participants and the partnership tasks. These practices appear to have fuelled the flow of both positive and negative emotions among the people involved in the partnership in ways that increased their involvement and participation. We underscore that there were four such practices – asking provocative questions, offering sensitive disclosures, opening the agenda to pursue spontaneous ideas, and valuing the other in attitudes and acts – and emphasize that all four were evident in each critical emotional events and were used in sequence. We suggest that this sequence of practices may be necessary to prompt the transformation of emotions, and would encourage further investigation of this sequence and its impact on the flow of emotions in other contexts.

Unlike practices oriented toward increasing control of the other, such as agenda setting or following guidelines, emotional engagement practices appear to involve subsuming one’s need for predictability to a desire to expand the ability of one’s partners to speak freely. These practices are thus grounded in a logic of risk-taking rather than risk-mitigating – a finding that stands in contrast to other studies that associate trust-building with risk minimization (Das & Teng, 2001) or threat reduction (Williams, 2007). More generally, the emotional engagement practices used by the partners during the critical emotional incidents can be seen as taking leaps of faith that provided clear and significant signals of trust that were hard to downplay (Weber et al., 2005). We see emotional engagement practices as a form of relational practice (Dutton & Dukerich, 2006) specifically related to emotions. While they share some of the characteristics of appreciative inquiry (e.g. Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005) and dialogical organizational development (e.g. Bushe, 2009), we propose that emotional engagement practices are intrinsically different. One of the distinguishing characteristics of emotional engagement practices is that they involve a combination of both potentially threatening and positive interactions. For example, rather than asking unconditionally positive questions, the MC partners triggered negative emotions through asking destabilizing and provocative questions. Posing tough questions in this way is highly consistent with the importance of identifying blind spots (Sanchez-Burks & Huy, 2009) and sources of defensiveness (Ely, Meyerson, & Davidson, 2006). Indeed, even the valuing practice often involved partners’ managing considerable personal discomfort. Although a degree of threat regulation and emotion management (Williams, 2007) was evident in these practices, they involved an acceptance of emotions, both negative and positive, rather than a minimization or downplaying of feelings. We encourage further work to explore the relationship between emotional engagement and emotion management.

Our study brings to light a richer and deeper understanding of the practices that make multi-stakeholder partnerships effective, drawing attention to the importance of emotional engagement practices as complements to widely used practices aimed at building trustworthiness. The emotional engagement practices are finer-grained examples of practices that may contribute to affect-based trust development beyond frequent interactions and peer-focused citizenship behaviours (McAllister, 1995). The affective trust developed through the MC partners’ navigation between rational and emotional engagement practices enabled them to generate more intangible energy and momentum to advance into new fields of activity, leading to results far exceeding those initially anticipated. Finally, the emotional engagement practices that we have uncovered open a novel focus of inquiry in the practice literature. The practice lens allows people to understand how things unfold over time through the interactions of people (Jarzabkowski, 2005). A variety of practices have been identified in this literature related to discourse (Mantere & Vaara, 2008), framing (Kaplan, 2008), and sensemaking (Rouleau, 2005). Our identification of practices that stimulate flows of emotions not only adds to the growing body of practice-oriented scholarship (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011), but may also offer complementary explanations for the cognitive framing practices (Kaplan, 2008) that have been identified in situations characterized by contestation and conflict.

Limitations

We acknowledge that our methodological decision to focus on an ‘extreme’ case study limits our ability to generalize directly to other multi-stakeholder partnerships. However, we would suggest that the difficulties these partners confronted may have simply made behaviour more visible that would otherwise have remained hidden (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007; Murphy & Arenas, 2010). While the legacies of distrust that pre-dated the partnership may have led to particularly strong emotional expression during the critical emotional incidents, failure to address subterranean emotional concerns might be expected to lead to similar incidents in other multi-stakeholder partnerships in which parties have different objectives, values, and indeed world views. Moreover, the fact that practices were effectively used by these partners to overcome such difficult starting conditions in no way negates their effectiveness in less volatile situations. An absence of effective emotional engagement practices might be one explanatory factor for the lack of success of multi-stakeholder partnerships. However, we would propose that further study in less extreme settings is merited to validate this point.

Future directions

Our micro-foundations approach to trust-building redirects the traditional lines of inquiry in the multi-stakeholder partnership literature and offers new lines of inquiry in the literature on organizational trust. Specifically, we believe that a critical emotional incidents approach may provide a valuable methodological point of departure for future investigations into partnerships and collaborative arrangements that complements earlier work on tensions, episodes (Eden & Huxham, 2001), and crises (Seitanidi & Crane, 2009). Building on the growing body of interpretive use of critical incident analysis that involves identifying incidents, their outcomes, and how they are managed (Chell, 1998), we propose the study of critical emotional incidents might extend this established technique to include explicit prompts related to emotional content. More broadly, we wonder if additional empirical study of critical emotional incidents – their triggers and responses – might shed light on a variety of other managerial issues related to the roles played by emotions in the interplay between trust and control (Costa & Bijlsma-Frankema, 2007), beyond the narrow context of multi-stakeholder partnerships. Are similar sequences of emotional engagement practices apparent in other contexts?

We also noted that as the MC partners began to trust each other to a greater degree through having successfully traversed multiple critical emotional incidents together, they appeared to identify more closely with the other partners’ desires and intentions, often referred to as ‘identification based trust’ (Lewicki & Bunker, 1995). We propose that future research might usefully explore the linkage between emotional engagement practices and identification-based trust, as well as the development of a sense of collective identity and collaboration (Hardy, Lawrence, & Grant, 2005) more broadly.

Ultimately, we found that managers themselves matter – not just in their cognitive orientations, but also in their emotional ones. While recognition of the role of emotions is growing in areas such as strategic change (Huy, 2002), similar efforts are needed to better understand their meaning in the enactment of stakeholder partnerships and engagement. By drawing attention to the emotional practices involved in building trust in this partnership, we hope to broaden the spectrum of practices that contribute to their success or failure. We believe that additional empirical study of the often messy processes of partnership engagement holds great promise in advancing our understanding of how these initiatives work.