Trust in startups implementing foreign expansion : leader’s perspective

The issue of supporting innovation, ensuring inclusive development, using new technologies and entrepreneurial potential is one of the basic elements of the concept of sustainable development, which is reflected, among others, in in EU strategic documents. There is a research gap where entrepreneurship is relatively little researched in the context of trust. Mainstream trust research overlooks entrepreneurship and its special features of placing uncertainty at the heart of its operation, in particular in the information, communication and high technology sector, and therefore among startups. The above results from the still weak research invention regarding the issues of managing these enterprises. Meanwhile, this is an area particularly predestined for research on trust. Therefore, the aim of the article is to try to answer the question about importance and the ways of building trust from the point of view of startup owners.

Author used critical review of relevant literature and in-depth interviews to carried out the research in startups implementing foreign expansion outside of Poland. The presented study is part of a wider project, including interviews with leaders of other technology companies, as well as with other employees of selected departments of these companies. This article presents the results of the study of the one of group of leaders who are owners of startups, implementing foreign expansion.

The conclusions drawn from the analysis confirm that the challenges underlying the foreign expansion of startups are not only technical, financial, legal or related to tax, etc. but they should be rooted and related to the need to take into account the specificity of the organizational culture of companies in their activities. The conducted research showed a high level of leaders' awareness of the need to build collective trust between employees in the company, but there is a need for systemic development at the institutional level regarding methods and tools that can be used in this regard. The key issue here is the growing importance of the organizational culture of trust built and developed by leaders, based on values. Therefore, the problem of managing startups in this context seems important, so that they can dynamically develop and grow.