Abstract
This study investigates the antecedents and targets of trust influencing organisations’ decisions to adopt blockchain technology. Through a grounded theory approach involving 20 semi-structured interviews with executives and managers from 19 enterprises in China, we identify six key trust antecedents: authoritarian culture, perceptions of feasibility, successful precedents, evaluation of organisational trustworthiness, data governance, and leadership engagement. These antecedents influence adoption decisions through three targets of trust: the technology itself, technology providers, and participants. Notably, data governance and external forces such as industry and national leadership engagement exert a pervasive impact across all three targets within an authoritarian context. A holistic conceptual framework is developed to elucidate how these trust antecedents impact trust targets, thereby shaping decisions regarding blockchain adoption. Furthermore, we discuss how these targets of trust influence adoption decisions, considering diverse perceptions of their functions and importance, as well as their interrelationship as complements or substitutes in the decision-making process.