Credible commitments in R&D Collaborations : a testing exercise with a troublesome construct

The findings reported here are part of a larger study on cross-sector R&D collaborations in the Australian Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) Programme. The study has sought to explain project partners’ collaboration experience using a theoretical model which was empirically tested with a survey of CRC project leaders. A key hypothesis was that the higher the level of relational trust amongst the partners in a collaborative project, the more positive would be the partners’ experience of the project. The construct of “credible commitments”, which is widely used in the inter-organisational literature, was posed in the model as an antecedent of relational trust and positively related to it. No support was found for the hypothesis. The findings are discussed and future areas of research.