Research On Measurements And Factors Of Strategic Alliance Performance

With the development of technology and globalization of economics，more andmore firms are engaged in strategic alliances to learn partner’s technology, gainresources, facilitate market entry, share risk, bypass trade barriers, initiate newproduct development, so as to sustain their competitive advantage. However, the highfailure rate and instability are along with strategic alliances’ popularity, and manyfirms did not achieve their goals through the strategic alliance. This paper combinedtheoretical and empirical methods to summarize and analyze measurements andfactors of strategic alliance based on the theory of alliance co-evolutionary dynamics.Furthermore, the paper proposed management characteristics as strategic alliancefactors and a theory model about strategic alliance performance, which includesmeasurements and factors of strategic alliance and alliance development process. Thetheory model and propositions suggested in the paper facilitate alliance success andprovide theory support and guidance to operate alliance.The paper mainly had three following results. Firstly, the paper proposed tocombine measurements based on two distinct loci of alliance performance-the allianceitself and the partners and combine objective measurements with subjective ones asstrategic alliance performance measurements. Secondly, the paper analyzed strategicalliance performance factors of existing literature, for example, alliance experienceand trust between partner enterprises are positive to alliance performance. However,the existing research are almost silent about managers’ characteristics whenexamining alliance performance factors which is significant to managers’ behaviorand alliance performance. To overcome this limitation, the paper suggested managers’personality as alliance performance factors creatively, and found that the characteristicof promotion regulatory focus had negative effect on strategic alliance performance inthe formation stage of the alliance, while had positive effect on the performance in theother two stages, on contrast, prevention regulatory focus is good for strategic allianceperformance in the formation stage of the alliance, while is bad for the performance inthe other two stages. Thirdly, the paper proposed a theory model of strategic allianceperformance which combines strategic alliance performance measurements andfactors in the alliance development process. In the theoretical model, the factors ofstrategic alliance performance were allocated into different alliance stages keeping pace with their importance in the stage. The paper found that managers’characteristics, industry characteristics and macroeconomic environment play animportant role through the whole alliance development process; partner firms’characteristics, inter-partner characteristics mainly has an impact on allianceperformance in the formation stage, and they are mainly affect the allianceperformance measurements-financial indicators and strategic objectives; internalcontrol and learning have effect on financial indicators, satisfaction and strategicobjectives in the alliance operation stage; meanwhile, relational capital mainly plays arole on the measurements of satisfaction and stability in the outcome stage.