The influence of behavioural and organisational characteristics on the success of international strategic alliances

Abstract

With the current trend toward globalisation and the increasing competitive and technological challenges of today's environment the formation of international strategic alliances has become an important part of many firm's international business strategies. Experience with international strategic alliances has shown that they face a number of problems, which can often result in the termination of the alliance. This study, therefore, aims to assess the impact of both behavioural and organisational characteristics on the success of international strategic alliances. The results show that behavioural characteristics play a more significant role in explaining overall alliance performance compared to organisational characteristics. High levels of commitment, trust, coordination, interdependence and communication are found to be good predictors of international strategic alliance success. Conflict, meanwhile, is found to hamper good performance. By contrast organisational characteristics such as structure and control mechanisms are found not to strongly influence the success of international strategic alliances.

Cross-sector social partnership success: A process perspective on the role of relational factors

“…The joint evaluation of outcomes and expectations is a common practice in the field of B2B relationships. Thus, many authors (Mohr & Spekman, 1994;Kauser & Shaw, 2004;Arenas & Garcia, 2006) evaluate partnership success by distinguishing two dimensions: the achievement of the expected outcomes as a result of the collaboration, and the level of satisfaction of the partners with the achievement of these outcomes. Hence, a BUS-NPO partnership process will be considered successful when it achieves the first dimension of expected collaboration outcomes, and the second dimension of partner satisfaction.…”

“…In particular, when partners have the potential of furthering their own interests at the expense of the other partners it becomes imperative not only to anticipate such behaviour (Khanna, Gulati, & Nohria, 1998;Park & Ungson, 2001), but also to consider its contribution to the relationship's success (Graf & Rothlauf, 2012). Concerns about behavioural uncertainty have been addressed in the literature by focusing on relational factors including trust and commitment (Morgan & Hunt, 1994;MacMillan, Money, Money, & Downing, 2005;Krishnan et al, 2006;Lancastre & Lages, 2006;Wittmann, Hunt, & Arnett, 2009;Wu, Weng, & Huang, 2012) as the two key mediating factors that predict the attainment of partnership success (Hunt, Lambe, & Wittmann, 2002;Kauser & Shaw, 2004;Arenas & García, 2006;Palmatier, Dant, & Grewal, 2007).…”

International master franchise agreements

“…There is some consensus within the literature on the importance of behavioural control to achieve alliance goals (Das and Teng, 1998;Gulati and Singh, 1998;Dekker, 2004;Kauser and Shaw, 2004). However, Larsen (1992) argues that social controls are the most important to manage the relational behaviour of alliance members.…”

Strategic Alliances and Culture in a Globalizing World

“…A number of scholars have highlighted the importance of trust in international strategic alliances (for example, Kauser and Shaw, 2004;Kwon, 2008;Robson et al, 2008) with the implicit argument that high levels of trust may allow the alliance partners eff ectively to bridge the cultural gap between them (Das and Teng, 1998). There is much to commend in this line of reasoning, and while it is certainly plausible to argue that trust creates the motivation to bridge diff erences, it is not so clear whether it also creates at the same time the ability to bridge such diff erences.…”