The Mechanism Of Strategic Alliance Evolution: A Social Exchange View

Strategic alliance is the long-term close cooperative interorganizational relationship established by two or more firms for achieving their respective certain strategic goals. Distinguished with the pure economic exchange relationship, strategic alliance also has the characteristics of social exchange. Social exchange is the long-term reciprocal voluntary actions among exchangers, and the interdependence between exchangers, the mutual trust between them and the positive performance they pursue are three necessary conditions for one social exchange to happen. The main intention of this article is to study the inside evolution mechanism of the strategic alliance combined with its characteristics of social exchange. We firstly introduce the background, meanings and goal of this study, after distinguishing the key conceptions, we review the current research about alliance evolution based on different theory schools and point out their limitations. Then according to the three dimensions of social exchange, based on partners' interdependence, trust and alliance performance, we respectively study the mechanism of alliance formation, evolution and dissolution. On basis of this theory analysis, according to the empirical data we collected from 237 strategic alliances and the two-step rules, utilizing the structural equation modeling and Amos Software, we demonstrate the theory hypotheses, discuss the main research results and the inside reason and propose the managerial implications for alliance management practice. Finally we conclude the whole research, point out the main limitation in this paper and make suggestions for the future research.Through this study we find that: firstly, the interdependence, affective trust between the cooperative partners and the performance they expect from the alliance are positively related with the alliance formation. Furthermore the research result shows that firms pay more attention to the non-rational analyses about their partners before alliance formation.Secondly, the alliance evolution is one synthetical outcome caused by the changes of the partners' interdependence, affective trust and the alliance performance. The affective trust between partners and the alliance performance they get are negatively related with the alliance evolution, whereas the interdependence has few influences on it.During the development process of the strategic alliance, with the improvement of the affective trust between collaborative partners, their relationship governance mechanism will change from formal contracts to relational contracts. The affective trust and formal contracts function as substitutes but not complements.The resources devoted by the cooperative firms determine the distribution of the alliance power, including the implicit and explicit power. Different types of resources, for example the property-based resources or the knowledge-based resources, have different resource exposure mechanism and accordingly the mechanism inside the partners' interdependence changes is different, too.Thirdly, the alliance dissolution may be directly caused by the bad alliance performance, whereas the decrease of the interdependence and affective trust between alliance partners won't have positively influences on alliance dissolution in a short-term period. However, the decrease of affective trust is usually caused by the objective conflict, process conflict or outcome conflict between the collaborative partners. And the decrease of partners' dependence can cause partners' combat for alliance power. During a long-tem time, these will have a negative influence on alliance performance and finally cause the alliance to be terminated.Fourthly, the three dimensions of the social exchange, the interdependence, affective trust between cooperative firms and the alliance performance they get, are found positively related with each other.The main contribution of this research is it proposes a social exchange view about strategic alliance evolution, this make up the limitations of current research in which the explanation about alliance evolution is limited and the examination about social elements in alliance is insufficient. Meanwhile, with the local alliances data, we take a large-scale empirical research and get the valuable research outcomes about Chinese local strategic alliance evolution, the research method we utilize is also different from the current research, in which the simple case study is commonly used.In this paper we extend the application of the social exchange theory to alliance evolution study, from that we get more understanding about alliance development, and as the same time some views in the social exchange theory are also demonstrated. Furthermore, we believe that the research results we get have a great realistic meaning in guiding alliance managers practicing and improving their alliance performance.