How and When Socially Entrepreneurial Nonprofit Organizations Benefit From Adopting Social Alliance Management Routines to Manage Social Alliances?

Social alliance is defined as the collaboration between for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Building on the insights derived from the resource-based theory, we develop a conceptual framework to explain how socially entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations (SENPOs) can improve their social alliance performance by adopting strategic alliance management routines. We test our framework using the data collected from 203 UK-based SENPOs in the context of cause-related marketing campaign-derived social alliances. Our results confirm a positive relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. We also find that relational mechanisms, such as mutual trust, relational embeddedness, and relational commitment, mediate the relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. Moreover, our findings suggest that different types of social alliance motivation can influence the impact of social alliance management routines on different types of the relational mechanisms. In general, we demonstrate that SENPOs can benefit from adopting social alliance management routines and, in addition, highlight how and when the social alliance management routines–social alliance performance relationship might be shaped. Our study offers important academic and managerial implications, and points out future research directions

Confident or competent? How to avoid superstitious learning in alliance portfolios

Impressive studies show that sharing alliance experience and having a dedicated alliance function lie at the foundation of repeated alliance success. However, with increasing experience, the dangers of overconfidence loom. In other words, certain learning mechanisms may well foster the adoption of inadequate cause-and-effect relationships derived from prior experience. Using such insights in other strategic alliances is likely to foster an imbalance between competence and confidence in alliance management. Hence, the challenge for today's firms seeking to improve their alliance portfolio outcomes lies in optimising the use of prior experiences by institutionalising routine activities, while also ensuring that new practices can be adopted. Using the insights of expert interviews and detailed analysis of 192 alliance portfolios containing over 3400 strategic alliances, convincing evidence shows how firms can ensure they increase their alliance capability with experience, without falling prey to the overconfidence trap. Important managerial lessons on how to avoid overconfidence in alliance portfolio management are discussed

Developing alliance capabilities

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Alliance capability, collaboration quality, and alliance performance : an integrated framework

Building on the complementary nature of transaction cost theory and the resource-based view, this study examines alliance capability and collaboration quality as antecedents of alliance performance. Although various researchers have investigated the individual concepts’ influences on alliance performance, an integrated view is missing. Building on earlier research, we propose an integrated framework, which links the firm-level concept of alliance capability with the dyadic level concept of collaboration quality, thus, increasing the understanding of the relationship between the theoretical concepts used to explain alliance performance. The framework suggests that both alliance capability and collaboration quality are antecedents of alliance performance, but more importantly that collaboration quality is an intermediate outcome of alliance capability