The Two Facets of Collaboration: Cooperation and Coordination in Strategic Alliances

This paper unpacks two underspecified facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination. Prior research has emphasized cooperation, and specifically the partners' commitment and alignment of interests, as the key determinant of collaborative success. Scholars have paid less attention to the critical role of coordination—the effective alignment and adjustment of the partners' actions. To redress this imbalance, we conceptually disentangle cooperation and coordination in the context of inter-organizational collaboration, and examine how the two phenomena play out in the partner selection, design, and post-formation stages of an alliance's life cycle. As we demonstrate, a coordination perspective helps resolve some empirical puzzles, but it also represents a challenge to received wisdom grounded in the salience of cooperation. To stimulate future research, we discuss alternative conceptualizations of the relationship between cooperation and coordination, and elaborate on their normative implications

Attention and Control

we review the research on attention processes and on organizational control, and develop a framework that explains how different mechanisms of control affect attention allocation in an organization

The two facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination in strategic alliances

This paper unpacks two underspecified facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination. Prior research has emphasized cooperation, specifically partners’ commitment and alignment of interests, as the key determinant of collaborative success. Scholars have paid less attention to the critical role of coordination—the effective alignment and adjustment of partners’ actions. To redress this imbalance, we conceptually disentangle cooperation and coordination in the context of inter-organizational collaboration, and examine how the two phenomena play out in the partner selection, design, and post-formation stages of an alliance’s life cycle

Strategic Alliance Structures: An Organization Design Perspective

While strategic alliances have emerged in recent years as common and important structural vehicles for business development, surprisingly little is known about how collaborative activities are organized and administered within these governance structures. We see classic organizational scholarship as useful insofar as it both provides clear classifications that distinguish alternative intraorganizational designs and explicates how they affect the inner workings of organizations. Existing alliance classification schemes based on type of collaborative activity, partner characteristics, or legal structure, on the other hand, rarely delineate important differences of how collaborative work is organized among partners. We seek to redress this shortcoming by developing a framework of alliance structural parameters based on classic organizational design considerations. Specifically we identify and discuss five key design parameters for alliances: the structural interface between partners, the structural intraface within partners, and the specialization, formalization, and centralization of the alliance organization. We show how consideration of these five parameters provides a deeper understanding of alliance governance and suggest how partner organizations can achieve differential levels of connectivity and steering for their collaborative ventures

Roaring out of a Recession

Research shows that 9% of companies come out of a recession stronger than ever. We explain their performance as a result of their ability to avoid false trade-offs during the downturn, and to integrate both cost-cutting and investment strategies