This study examines how firms' alliance orientation impacts firm financial performance, varying across manufacturing and retail service industries and during the COVID-19 Crisis. Coopetition requires simultaneous competition and cooperation, sometimes competition-based coopetition, other times cooperation-based coopetition. In this study, alliance orientation was used as the observable construct, enabling us to interpret its implications within the broader literature on coopetition dynamics.
We used a sample of 330 Portuguese and Spanish firms across different industries and employed an Ordinary Least Squares model. The study spans 2013–2022, encompassing pre-COVID-19 and during COVID-19 pandemic periods.
Results show that alliance orientation positively influences financial performance in the retail services industry, particularly during COVID-19, where alliances mitigated the negative effects of firm age, sales growth opportunities and asset tangibility. No significant effect was observed in manufacturing firms, highlighting industry-specific dynamics.
The study offers threefold novelties. First, it assesses the impact of strategic alliance engagement on financial performance through an econometric model that considers the effect of strategic alliances on return on assets and includes control variables to express organizational complexity. Second, it highlights that the benefits of alliance strategies, which can enable coopetition dynamics, vary across industries. Third, it provides evidence that alliance orientation can be a strategic risk and crisis management mechanism, particularly during disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
