Characteristics of successful UK international strategic alliances: behavioural and organizational factors

Abstract

With the current trend toward globalization and the increasing competitive and technological challenges of today’s environment the formation of international strategic alliances between firms have become an important part of many firm’s strategies and have grown in importance as a mode of international business operations. However, experience with international strategic alliances has shown that they face a number of problems which can often result in the termination of the alliance. For this purpose it is important to address the factors that are impacting the success of international strategic alliances. Behavioural and organizational characteristics of interorganizational relationships have been identified as being important to the successful management of the international strategic alliance. However, a clear understanding of their impact on performance in the academic literature is deficient. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to address the behavioural and organizational characteristics of international strategic alliance success. The specific objectives of this study are (i) to provide an empirical analysis of UK strategic alliance activity with firms from Western Europe, the USA and Japan (ii) to determine the successful characteristics of strategic alliances between UK firms and their international partners and (iii) to assess the influence of behavioural and organizational characteristics on the success of UK international strategic alliances. Data was collected using both primary and secondary sources. The creation of a database of UK international strategic alliances through secondary sources was the first stage of the research. This allowed the identification of a number of international strategic alliances used in the second stage of the research, which involved the collection of data through a mail survey. The data was analysed using factor analysis, descriptive statistics, t-tests, multiple discriminant analysis and multiple regression. The results of the study have shown that while both behavioural and organizational characteristics are important to UK international strategic alliances, behavioural characteristics distinguish successful UK international strategic alliances from less successful international alliances. Successful UK international strategic alliances are characterized by higher levels of commitment, trust, coordination, interdependence and communication and lower levels of conflict. Performance of UK international strategic alliances was also found to be positively related to commitment, trust, coordination, interdependence and communication. Relatively few differences were found between successful and less successful alliances in terms of structure and control. Furthermore, very few relations were found between performance and structure and control characteristics