مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

Although prior studies show that almost half of strategic alliances fail, some firms have indeed enjoyed great success with their alliances (Anand & Khanna, 2000; Kale & Singh, 2007; Zhang, Shu, Jiang, & Malter, 2010). What, then, drives strategic alliance success? This crucial question has attracted various explanations, among which the firmlevel factors have gradually gained prominence. For example, Kale, Dyer, and Singh (2002) find that firm-level alliance capability (a firm’s alliance experience and its investment in a dedicated alliance function) leads to alliance success. In a follow-up study, Kale and Singh (2007) provide evidence that a firm’s alliance learning process is positively linked to its overall alliance success. Despite this prevalence in examining determinants of alliance success, less scholarly attention has been given to a very crucial firm-level variable—entrepreneurial orientation (EO), which refers to a firm’s strategic posture that is characterized by acting innovatively, taking risks, and being proactive towards the market (Covin & Slevin, 1989; Miller, 1983). While studies have suggested that linking EO to explaining alliance variables in an effort to better understand its role in alliance phenomena represents a crucial research agenda (Slevin & Terjesen, 2011), the question remains: Do firms that can more extensively enact their EO achieve greater alliance success? Two motivations fuel our study. First, recent entrepreneurship research has acknowledged the importance of strategic alliances for the implementation of entrepreneurial activities (Teng, 2007). For example, firms can better enact their EO in achieving higher performance when participating in research or marketing alliances (Brouthers, Nakos, & Dimitratos, 2015). Meanwhile, as EO is a vital organizational characteristic that impacts individual firms’ activities (Miller, 1983), it is assumed that when firms enter into a specific alliance, an EO might also guide their alliance activities such as helping them grasp the learning and resource-seeking opportunities in the collaboration (Sarkar, Echambadi, & Harrison, 2001; Teng, 2007). Indeed, studies have extended the consequences of EO into the realm of strategic alliances, but have yielded few significant implications for alliance formation such as alliance use (Dickson & Weaver, 1997) and alliance processes such as knowledge spillovers (Shu, Liu, Gao, & Shanley, 2014), leaving the effect of EO on final alliance outcomes underexplored. To fill this gap, this study leverages the resource-based view (RBV) to investigate the role of EO in firmlevel alliance success, i.e., the extent to which a firm attains its main strategic goals in a given alliance (Kale et al., 2002; Schreiner, Kale, & Corsten, 2009). By doing so, we hope to extend and bridge the two research streams that usually develop independently: that on entrepreneurship and that on strategic alliances.

Second, it may be better to consider a firm’s relationships with alliance partners when exploring the EO-alliance success linkage. Research suggests that a high EO alliance firm is not the same atomistic as a high EO individual firm because an alliance firm’s enactment of entrepreneurial posture is likely to be bounded by its relationships with partners (Yang, Lin, & Peng, 2011). In this study, we deem relationships between partners (cooperation and conflict) as critical contingencies that shape the EO–alliance success linkage. Specifically, we ask: How do an alliance firm’s implementation of EO and its relationships with partners jointly affect its alliance performance? This unanswered question prompts a contingent examination of the EO–alliance success relationship for two reasons. First, the relational view suggests that relationships between partners may direct firms’ motivations and expectations to enact their entrepreneurial postures in alliances (Jiang, Yang, Pei, & Wang, 2016; Simsek, Lubatkin, & Floyd, 2003). Second, these relationships may influence the effectiveness of firms’ entrepreneurial strategies (De Carolis & Saparito, 2006; Welter, 2011).

Traditional studies have often presented cooperation and conflict as the extremes of a single interorganizational relationship or the two ends of a continuum describing relationships between organizations (Alter, 1990; Gillespie & Mileti, 1979). In the alliance context, the literature also indicates that alliance partnerships are associated not only with cooperative behaviors but also with non-cooperative or competitive behaviors (Kumar, 2010; Zhang, Shu, et al., 2010). Specifically, cooperation is the result of a dyad’s common interests, while conflict arises due to their pursuit of private benefits (Khanna, Gulati, & Nohria, 1998). Broadly referring to a relational view (Borgatti & Cross, 2003; Dyer & Singh, 1998), cooperation and conflict, inherent and conceptually distinct, characterize two key aspects of an alliance partnership. Here, we take the view that a relationship that a firm believes will help it achieve common strategic goals with alliance partners is seen as cooperative (Zhang, Shu, et al., 2010). By responding to calls by White and Lui (2005) for more analyses of the distinction between the behavioral and affective dimensions of an alliance relationship, we further view cooperation as a two-dimensional construct. It has a behavioral component, i.e., joint action, which reflects how closely partners work together to accomplish various tasks or activities (Schreiner et al., 2009), and an affective component, i.e., bonding, which reflects the extent to which partners are fused together through formal and informal links (Rodríguez & Wilson, 2002; Sarkar, Aulakh, & Cavusgil, 1998). In the meantime, conflict is an awareness on the part of one alliance partner of another partner’s incompatibilities (Jehn & Mannix, 2001), possibly arising from the other partner’s opportunism or from goal incongruence between the partners (Kale, Singh, & Perlmutter, 2000).