Chapter 2: Operating Routines, Cultural Alignment, and Relational Mechanisms in Alliances

Strategic alliances have proliferated in recent years. These voluntary arrangements between firms facilitate exchange or sharing of resources for the co-development or provision of products, services, or technologies. Alliances may take the form of joint ventures that entail investments by the partners in ajointly established organization or of nonequity alliances that maintain the partners’ independence and tend to have narrower scope and a shorter lifespan. Alliances are a useful vehicle for firms to access new markets, lower costs, reduce time-to-market, share risks, and swiftly adjust to changing market conditions. Nevertheless, nearly half of all alliances fail to meet their objectives, terminate prematurely, or perform unsatisfactorily (Kale, Dyer, & Singh, 2002; Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, & MacAvoy, 1998). Consequently, scholars have been very interested in identifying the factors that enable some firms to increase the success rates of their alliances.