Partner selection

Chapter 9 considers the critical issue of what sort of company would make a good partner. It notes that most companies assess their prospective partners in terms of the complementarity of their assets and skills and the possible synergies that arise as a result of them. Fewer, however, devote sufficient attention to the cultural compatibility between the partners. Yet this factor is often responsible for the breakdown of alliances. The culture web (symbols, power structures, organization structure, controls, rituals and routines, and stories) depicted by Johnson et al. (2017) and the cultural profile (employee orientation, environmental orientation, international orientation, customer orientation, technology orientation, innovation orientation, cost orientation, and quality orientation) proposed by Bronder and Pritzl (1992) are both useful tools for assessing the presence of cultural difference between prospective alliance partners and hence the likelihood of culturally-related problems arising.