Title: Team coordination in strategic alliances: identifying conditions that reduce team willingness to cooperate

Authors: Dave Luvison; Michelle A. Marks

Addresses: Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University, 2450 Crystal Drive, Arlington, VA 22202, USA ' George Mason University, Mason Hall D109E, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA

Abstract: Effective coordination has been found to be an important component of strategic alliance success, but the literature has not considered the coordination challenge that occurs when parties are unwilling to cooperate with one another. This paper adopts a team level lens, informed by insights from cooperation and social identity theories, to discuss areas that affect teams' willingness to cooperate with other teams that form the network of teams operating in an alliance. This approach contributes to the literature by outlining conditions that allow more fine-grained estimation of coordination costs. In this paper, we propose that willingness to cooperate is affected by the congruence of a team's objectives with those of the overall alliance, team interdependencies, the size of the network of teams and the effectiveness of handoff processes across teams. Research and applied implications of this model are discussed.

Keywords: strategic alliances; competition; team coordination; team cooperation; coopetition; multi-team systems; teams; teamwork; willingness to cooperate.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSBA.2013.058290

International Journal of Strategic Business Alliances, 2013 Vol.3 No.1, pp.1 - 22

Received: 23 Dec 2011
Accepted: 22 Dec 2012
Published online: 19 Jul 2014 *

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