Beyond the contract: Exploring the multi-faceted nature of governance and disruptions in strategic alliances

Strategic alliances have received significant attention from practitioners and research given their prevalence as a strategy for organizations to complement their internal value-creation activities. However, strategic alliances are complex and fraught with challenges, making the governance of alliances of particular interest. In this dissertation I contribute to this line of research by exploring the multifaceted nature of alliance governance as well as the individual level of alliance governance mechanisms. I do so through three empirical chapters to help deepen our understanding of alliance governance. In the first chapter, I study whether alliance contracts that induce a collective identity through their phrasing, or ‘contractual identity framing’ help facilitate trust between individual alliance boundary spanners following a disruption. Findings show that contractual identity frames facilitate higher trust for individuals with a low likelihood to trust others. In the second chapter, I conduct an inductive case study of a bilateral alliance that showed a counter-intuitive patterns of strong alliance collaboration yet weak alliance goal achievement. Findings point to the interplay of project-level and alliance level governance conditions that facilitate or hinder goal achievement in project based alliances. In the third chapter, I study how third-party interventions can help alliance partners repair an alliance characterized by negative relational dynamics. The findings of the study point to the role of third-party interventions to help re-align attention of both partners towards the alliance, and subsequently re-confirm complementarity (in skills and resources) and compatibility (in work culture) to successfully repair the alliance.