| Although corporate federalism is suggested as an organizational mechanism for increasing participants' commitments within strategic alliances, it is unclear the extent to which existing strategic alliances are properly practicing corporate federalism. As strategic alliances, at least in their structures, take on an extended form of corporate federalism, there is the danger of blindly considering strategic alliances to have adopted an extension of corporate federalism without evaluating actual practices against its principles.;Existing studies offer conceptual definitions, antecedents, and results of corporate federalism. However, they do not offer empirical analyses of the relationships among these concepts. Some empirical studies of the practice of decentralization, an organizational form related to corporate federalism, can be found in the fields of strategic management, international business, and organizational studies. However, these studies focus on the cost saving, flexibility, and innovation as the performance criteria of the decentralization mechanism in strategic alliances without evaluating the extent to which federalist principles are involved in promoting the commitment of participating organization in the objectives of the alliance.;The goal of this study is to propose and to validate a customized corporate federalism model as applied to strategic alliances. In order to represent the unique characteristics of corporate federalism in strategic alliances, the proposed model will be used to first evaluate the extent to which participating organizations fulfill the requirements of corporate federalism in strategic alliances. Then, the model will be used to examine the relationships between the levels of requirements fulfillment to the levels of execution of the principles of corporate federalism within a strategic alliance. Finally, the model will be used to evaluate performance of corporate federalism, by assessing its performance in terms of the increase in commitment of the participating organizations toward the goals of the strategic alliance.;The contribution of this research is twofold. This research extends previous studies by developing a customized model for corporate federalism as applied to strategic alliances. Second, based on the results of testing the proposed model, the current study provides a course of actions for the leaders of strategic alliances to successfully implement corporate federalism within knowledge-based networks. |
