Summary
This study examines the role of ongoing social exchanges between alliance partners such as interfirm reciprocity, trust, and mutual influence in the partners' perceived alliance performance and propensity to continue an alliance. An empirical examination of data collected from the executives managing strategic alliances (N = 144) revealed that social exchanges such as reciprocity, trust, and mutual influence between partners are positively related to perceived alliance performance and propensity to continue the alliance.
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Extract
An Empirical Examination of the Role of Social Exchanges in Alliance Performance
Strategic alliances have become a major corporate strategy in many high-tech industries such as electronics, telecommunication, pharmaceutical, and machine tools industries (Gulati et al, 2000; Yoshino and Rangan, 1995). Strategic alliances allow firms to develop new competencies quickly, and rapidly expand in geographically disperse locations offering the greatest levels of opportunity and flexibility (Dyer and Singh, 1998; Gulati et al, 2000). While alliances are becoming an attractive option, many strategic alliances have been unstable, ineffective and poorly performing (Arino and Doz, 2000). The potential for conflict and a clash of interest between alliance partners is inherent, because either party can opportunistically use the alliance to learn the other's business or technological secrets (Doz, 1996; Khanna et al, 1998).
Previous alliance research has focused on this issue of partner opportunism and has adopted a transaction cost economics view (Pisano, 1989; Williamson, 1991) to argue that high transaction costs resulting from opportunistic behavior can be alleviated through appropriate contractual controls or equity-based ownership controls (Kogut, 1988; Pisano, 1989). These views, however, neglect the fact that the cost of deterring opportunism is very high and excessive controls may increase coordination costs (Ring and Van de Yen, 1994) and intensify power conflicts between alliance partners (Provan and Skinner, 1989; Steensma and Lyles, 2000; Yan and Gray, 1994). The challenges posed by alliances have encouraged scholars to look beyond the issue of partner opportunism and explore the evolutionary collaborative processes (Arino and Doz, 2000) and, specifically, the role of social ties such as trust in enhancing alliance performance (Doz, 1996; Lazaric, 1998; Ring andVandeVen, 1994).While some researchers have examined the relationship between interfirm trust and alliance performance (Inkpen and Curall, 1998; Luo, 2002; Sako, 2000; Zaheer et al, 1998), others have argued that several factors such as risk and uncertainty, cultural diversity of partners, and resource dependence (Elangovan and Shapiro, 1998; Luo, 2002) affect the relationship between trust and alliance performance. Thus, there is a need for research into the role of other social exchanges such as reciprocal resource commitments a...See the full content of this document
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