Research background. This paper extends the research of Xxxxxxx (2006), Xxxxxxx et al. (2005, 2006) and Xxxxx et al. (2004). Xxxxxxx (2006) investigated the importance of trust, participation and strategic relevance with respect to intangible and financial performance (see paragraph 2.6). Although the article argued that in contradiction to other research trust has no significant effect on tangible or intangible performance, additional research definitely was needed. Xxxxxxx et al. (2005, 2006) contributed a lot with research on the importance of intellectual capital in universities and research institutes. Also Xxxxxxx has done a lot on the field of setting up an intellectual capital report for universities. Xxxxx et al. (2004) has investigated indicators of trust, which were partially used to set up the questionnaire. Finally, Xxxxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx (2005) already pointed out the importance of investigating the impact of trust and loyalty. Although Anskaitis and Xxxxxxxx (2005) investigated the importance of customer loyalty, the employee loyalty indicators used in this thesis are deducted from Anskaitis and Xxxxxxxx (2005). To gather data for the research, two methods were used. First of all, a questionnaire was developed in Snap, which was electronically sent to the different researchers (Supplement 3). The purpose of this survey was to find out if the degree of trust and employee loyalty within the different research institutes. Secondly, some performance indicators were needed for the different research institutes in order to compare the degrees of trust and employee loyalty with these performance measures. Since research institutes are not seen as profit- orientated organizations, normal indicators such as profit, turnover, clientele, etcetera were not that relevant. For research institutes it is more important what their scientific output is, being the number of publications in national and international journals. For this latter type of information, secondary data were used, mainly annual reports of the different institutes.
