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

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.