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The Role of Trust Issuers
in International Strategic Alliance Partnerships
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August 2003
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Strategic alliances constitute one of the
most common means of entering international markets. As such, they
have attracted considerable research attention in the international marketing
and business fields for the best part of two decades. Although a
large part of this academic inquiry has been directed at discovering ways
to make ISAs more effective, there is consensus that the majority of these
deals fail to achieve their set objectives (Beamish and Delios 1997).
Against this background, several prominent commentators have stressed the
importance of understanding and aligning the needs of co-collaborators
and of matching with a trustworthy partner. It is now acknowledged
that in the absence of a reserve of trust, ISAs which experience threats
to stability often dissolve (Arino and de la Torre 1998). Prima facie,
it seems that it is how you feel not what you contribute that is most important
in making cross-cultural business alliances work.
The basic problem of alliance management lies
in that firms need to cooperate fully within an ISA in order to create
and maximize value, but at the same time act competitively to safeguard
their own side’s interests. Each alliance partner fears the other
will get the larger payoff by acting opportunistically, while it cooperates
in good faith. Thus, interfirm trust can quickly dissipate in an
ISA if one side gets even a small inclination that something is afoot.
Hence, the development and maintenance of trust is a crucial partnership
management issue. Although collaborative strategy research has focused
recently on understanding multilevel trust, i.e., interpersonal (between
alliance managers) and interfirm (between alliance partners) trust (see
Currall and Inkpen 2002), this emerging body of study is inherently dyadic.
What is not well understood is how trust develops within a closed network
of three or more firms.
From our own fieldwork, we have noticed several
international alliance arrangements where one firm (A) facilitates and
supervises the development of a cross-border alliance partnership between
two others (firms B and C). Firm A is invariably an experienced MNC
collaborator with close relationships with both B and C, and these links
can allow trust to blossom between B and C despite their not having collaborated
previously (see Figure 1). B and C are, as a result, able build a
productive working relationship more quickly and easily. For example,
Honda has played matchmaker and marriage guidance counsellor in dyadic
partnerships between certain of its U.K. (e.g., Unipart) and Japanese (e.g.
Yutaka Giken) components suppliers in an effort to be supplied with the
most advanced and technologically sophisticated components in Europe.
That a ‘trust issuer’ is able to bestow trust upon the relationship between
‘trust users’, has significant implications for the development, composition
and stability of trust in dyadic ISAs. The pervasiveness of trust
across channel relationship levels constitutes an insightful future direction
for international marketing research on alliance trust development.
Figure 1: A Trust Hierarchy?
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Constantine
S. Katsikeas, Cardiff Business School
Matthew
J. Robson, Cardiff Business School
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| References
Arino, Africa,
and Jose de la Torre (1998), “Learning From Failure: Toward an Evolutionary
Model of Collaborative Ventures,” Organization Science, 9 (3): 306-25.
Beamish,
Paul W., and Andrew Delios (1997), “Improving Joint Venture Performance
Through Congruent Measures of Success,” in Cooperative Strategies: Asian
Pacific Perspectives, Paul W. Beamish and J. Peter Killing, eds.. San Francisco:
New Lexington Press.
Currall,
Steven C., and Andrew C. Inkpen (2002), “A Multilevel Approach to Trust
in Joint Ventures,” Journal of International Business Studies, 33 (3),
479-95.
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