B.V. Tjemkes

The antecedents of response strategies in strategic alliances

Purpose – Strategic alliances involve uncertainty, interdependence, and vulnerability, which often create adverse situations. This paper seeks to understand how alliance managers respond to these adverse situations by examining the influence of four exchange variables on response strategies.Design/methodology/approach – A scenario‐based experiment provides empirical support for a typology consisting of seven conceptually and empirically distinct response strategies: exit, opportunism, aggressive voice, creative voice, considerate voice, patience, and neglect.Findings – The results indicate that economic satisfaction, social satisfaction, alliance‐specific investments, and the availability of attractive alternatives differentially and interactively affect response strategies.Research limitations/implications – The study offers two main contributions to alliance literature. First, the seven response strategies accurately represent reactions that alliance managers use to deal with adverse situations. Second,...

Responding to Adverse Situations Within Exchange Relationships: The Cross-Cultural Validity of a Circumplex Model

When faced with adverse situations in exchange relationships, the people involved are required to respond. Response strategies are reactions to such adverse situations and represent cognitive schemata organized in an integrated structure forming a mental map. Extant response strategy research implicitly assumes that the content and internal structure of response strategies is universal, but with few exceptions, it fails to assess cross-cultural validity, a necessary step to investigate potential cultural variations in response strategy preferences. This study has investigated the cross-cultural validity of a circumplex model in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, and Japan. The seven response strategies examined attained measurement equivalence, and six were organized in an equivalent circumplex structure in all four countries. The findings also revealed cross-cultural differences in people’s preference to use response strategies. This study therefore contributes to the cross-cultural psychology literature by demonstrating that response strategy content and structure are nearly universal, whereas preferences for using response strategies vary across cultures.

Faultline deactivation: Dealing with activated faultlines and conflicts in global teams

Many organizations rely on teams made up of people of different nationalities, so-called global teams. While recent studies have identified that the outcomes of global teams are often hampered by team conflicts, few effective ways to prevent conflicts have been proposed. One of the main causes of conflicts in global teams are team faultlines, which are hypothetical dividing lines that can split a team into subgroups based on the team members’ demographic alignment along multiple characteristics. The model proposed herein builds on the notion that it is possible to prevent conflicts resulting from team faultlines. We explain how the notion of faultline deactivation—that is, the process of minimizing the salience of faultlines in teams—is crucial for preventing conflict in global teams. We develop a typology of faultline deactivators and explain the crucial roles that diversity training, superordinate team identity, direct channels for knowledge sharing, task reflexivity, centralized leadership, and collective trust play in deactivating faultlines and preventing conflicts in global teams. We provide extensive guidance on how to prepare for and implement these faultline deactivators in the managerial reality of global teams and discuss the implications of the model for future research.

Make or break alliances : A process model of faultline contagion and alliance instability

The performance of alliance arrangements is strongly affected by their inherent instability - fluctuating patterns of relational and collaborative processes. To provide insight in the drivers of al...

Open Service Innovation: Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

Open service innovation enables business service firms to realize service innovations through engaging in external partnerships. The results of a review of studies investigating open innovation in a business service context indicate that prior work (1) primarily drew on a learning lens to explain service innovation and (2) adopted three levels of analysis, that is, alliance, alliance portfolio, and network, resulting in three disconnected research streams. In this chapter, we review each research stream and suggest future research opportunities. In addition, we suggest that factors tied to the three analysis levels directly and interactively influence service innovation. Therefore, we propose a multi-level open service innovation framework that can guide future research.

Don't Forget the Individual: The Effect of Individual Characteristics on Organization's Opportunism

In this study, we set to explore whether individual-level factors account for variation in organizations’ opportunistic behavior that is not explained by relational- and environmental-level factors...

A circumplex model of the behavioral antecedents of unintended strategic alliance termination: a PLS based analysis

How do firms terminate unsatisfactory strategic alliances? Previous literature on alliance termination has considered exiting an alliance to be a single event. Drawing on circumplex response strategy literature, we propose that alliance termination is part of an integrated system of behavioural responses to adversity. The findings of a scenario-based experiment, obtained through PLS modelling, demonstrate that alliance termination is part of an integrated structure of response strategies governed by two active–passive and constructive destructive dimensions, which suggests that intermediate behavioural responses precede alliance termination. The article also shows that alliance termination can occur through two alternative termination paths depending on the nature of the adverse situation. Building on these findings, the article concludes with some guidelines for managers confronted with alliance termination.

Managers' risk propensity and destructive behavior in buyer-seller relationships:an application of PLS-analysis

Despite their popularity, buyerseller relationships are often dissatisfying and engender destructive behavior, such as opportunism and exit by one partner. To explain destructive behavior, previous supply chain management studies primarily focused on the influence of situational factors, such as social and economic dissatisfaction, without accounting for managers’ risk propensity. Accounting for risk is critical though, because destructive behavior in buyerseller relationships cannot be dissociated from the people who manage them. Drawing on risk and buyerseller literature, the authors develop and empirically test a model that incorporates a moderating effect of the risk perceptions of situational factors on the relationship between a manager’s risk propensity and the inclination to exit the relationship and act opportunistically. A survey of purchasing managers indicates that the positive relationship between risk propensity and destructive behavior is strengthened by social dissatisfaction and mitigated by economic dissatisfaction.

Service compris... à certaines conditions

De plus en plus d’entreprises industrielles ajoutent des services a leur offre pour se differencier. Les resultats d’une etude empirique sur leurs choix et leur performance.

Open innovation and KIBS Start-Ups: Technology- and market based alliance portfolio configurations

Firms are increasingly relying on combining internal resources with external knowledge to sustain firm renewal, which has led to open innovation being considered critical to a firm’s competitive advantage (Chesbrough, 2003). Successful open innovation produces first-mover advantages, superior financial returns, market growth, and market share (Lichtenhaler, 2011). In particular, knowledgeintensive business services (KIBS) start-ups—defined as “[new] expert companies that provide services to other companies and organizations” (Toivonen, 2006, 2)—rely on open innovation, as it is their primary knowledge input and output (Gallouj, 2002). However, KIBS start-ups are exposed to extant uncertainty because they face risk in the form of liability of newness, liability of smallness, and fundamental uncertainty. This uncertainty can be mitigated via a firm’s portfolio of alliance relationships (Ozcan and Eisenhardt, 2009).