THE RELATIONS BETWEEN PARTNER SELECTION OF INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIC ALLIANCES AND ALLIANCE PERFORMANCE IN CROSS-CULTURAL RESPECT─AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON TAIWAN''''S CROSS-BORDER ENTERPRISES

• Main Author: 葉如芳
• Other Authors: Wen-kuei Liang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/61522302731407631617

碩士 === 大同大學 === 事業經營研究所 === 90 === Companies in nearly all sectors of the economy are facing a MORE complex, volatile and competitive market than before. To simultaneously attain the availability of a skilled workforce, access to the latest technology, modern information, physical infrastructure, and so forth, many firms are learning to forge international strategic alliances (ISAs) with other companies. Especially for Taiwan, the island-economy-orientation where the market and natural resources are limited, actively seeking for the opportunities of ISAs could help Taiwanese companies not only compete with other large foreign enterprises but also involve themselves on the stage of the world economy. Even though many firms have benefited from ISAs, many others have been disappointed by poor performance and skeptical about what a strategic alliance could achieve for them. Some scholars have pointed out that ignoring both cross-cultural differences and integration of international human resource management (IHRM) could lead to failure of ISAs. Reviewing the previous literature about partner selection and alliance performance, relatively little research effort has been devoted to the crucially important process of partner selection and alliance performance from the angles of both cross-cultural differences and integration of IHRM. In this regard, therefore, this study is to probe how cross-cultural differences and integration of IHRM affect the linkage between partner selection and alliance performance, thereby filling this gap in alliance formation. For this study, we define ISAs as two or more independent firms cooperative with each other to achieve strategically significant goals and get mutual benefits based on a formal contract. According to Hofstede’s and Trompenaars’s theories, we derive nine dimensions for national cultural differences of partner selection criteria. Moreover, three parts of the conceptual framework are set up, including partner selection criteria of ISAs, integration of international human resource management, and alliance performance, thus formulating six hypotheses to test those relations. The samples of this study are taken randomly from the leading 500 firms in the manufacturing and service industries according to the ranking information of the China Credit Information Service. All of those firms are engaged in cross-border business. Furthermore, by eliminating the 18 returned responses, neither completely filled in nor engaged in ISAs, the final valid response rate was 20.33% As to our research conclusion, there is a positive relationship between partner selection criteria and alliance performance. Those criteria include national and organizational cultural differences, complementarity of resource and capability, compatibility, trust and commitment. Nevertheless, the criterion of host government negatively leads to alliance performance. Besides, the independent variables with strong discriminatory power are compatibility, regulation, trust and commitment, R & D and technical capability, efficiency, flexibility, power distance and reputation, organizational cultural differences, while the ones with low discriminatory power are production resource and capability, and host government. Speaking of partner selection criteria, integration of IHRM, and alliance performance, as is expected, there is a strong intervening effect on the relationship between partner selection criteria and alliance performance. The contribution of this research are (1) we clarify the national cultural differences of partner selection criteria by integrating of both Hofstede’s and Trompenaars’s theories; (2) we concretely explore the relation between the national cultural differences of partner selection criteria and alliance performance; (3) after adding the construct of the integration of IHRM into discussion, we test if this construct affects the relation between the national cultural differences of partner selection criteria and alliance performance; (4) we provide insights and guidelines for managers to effectively deal with the risk in the management of cross-cultural differences. Finally, the results of this study should be interpreted in light of some of its limitations as the following: (1) the measurement of alliance performance, (2) the limitation of tested subjects, and (3) the limitation of returned samples. The suggestion for management is that the more national cultural differences a cross-border firm knows, the more satisfactory and profitable collaborative performance it has. For the future research, we point out as follows: (1) developing a more complete and significant construct of national cultural dimensions, (2) setting up more appropriate indicators of alliance performance, (3) drawing subjects from specific industries, (4) analyzing the correlation of ISAs based on each alliance’s respect, (5) comparing and contrasting the existing results with the new one in China.