An Study Of Alliance Portfolio Configuration Strategies' Effect On Firm Performance Based On The Contingency Perspective

Based on resource-based theory, the valuable, scarce, irreplaceable, um-imitable resources are the source of competitiveness for firms. With the development of economy globalization, there are increasing firms who regard strategic alliance as the effective way to enter new market, share R&D cost, improve market share, provide optimal service for customers. Firms should broadly cooperate with others in the social network which they are involved in to expand channels for acquiring resources and increasing their resource reserves, then combine the external complementary or heterogeneous resources with internal resources to recreate new, um-imitable resources, which can help firms maintain the prominent competitive position in market. Therefore, strategic alliances are viewed as a good way to conduct inter-organizational learning and a positive media to enable exchanges of technologies, resources and knowledge among firms. Besides, with the involvement of alliance patterns, it is very common that a firm simultaneously develop different patterns of alliance relationship with many firms. Building alliance portfolio is increasingly becoming a imperative strategic behavior of enterprises.However, one consequence of the increasing alliance size and patterns is that, the failure rate of forming alliances also increases. So discussing how to construct the structure of alliance portfolio to diversify risks as a strategic view should be put on the board management agenda. In this article, referring to transaction-cost theory, resource-based theory and social-network theory, we are trying to analyze the moderate factors which influence the performance of alliance portfolio configuration strategies, then figure out which kinds of fit among alliance portfolio configuration strategies and the moderate factors can contribute to firm performance. We propose that the performance of alliance portfolio configuration strategies can be moderated by some contingency factors such as firm age, types of competitive strategies and different dimensions of TMT heterogeneity, and assume that the fit among these variables positively associate with firm performance. Hypotheses of the study are testified with data collected from listed bio-pharmaceutical companies of China, the hierarchical regression results show that firm age, differentiation strategy, TMT age heterogeneity and TMT gender heterogeneity positively moderate the relationship between the exploratory alliance portfolio strategy and firm performance, while low-cost strategy, TMT education background heterogeneity positively moderate the relationship between the exploitive alliance portfolio strategy and firm performance.Therefore, we provide some practical management suggestions to managers according to our results. In the first place, managers should realize that it is imperative for firms to strategically construct their alliance portfolio to improve performance. Besides, managers should know that only considering the advantages and disadvantages of strategy itself is not right, they should comprehensively consider the fit among firm activities, figure out in what condition can the strategy improve performance. In addition, managers should be clear that it is impossible that firms only use individual strategy in the process of development, so implementing different strategies according to internal and external factors and figuring out the relationships among strategies help firms understand what kinds of combination of strategies can contribute to firm performance.