Survival, Short-Term and Long-Term Performance of Strategic Alliances

Can we predict which alliances that will terminate, and which alliances that will be successful over time? This is the core research question raised in this paper. By reviewing transaction cost economics, the resource-based view of strategy, and the relational contracting perspective, we derive at important alliance characteristics that these perspectives suggest as important for understanding alliance success and failure. Our hypotheses were tested on one hundred strategic alliances from the Norwegian manufacturing sector covering a five-year period. The results show that strategic alliances based on access to strategic important resources were less likely to terminate abruptly. We also found that newly established alliances had a higher termination rate than older alliances, indicating that alliances go through different phases of termination risk. Short-term performance was primarily affected by factors such as getting access to complementary and strategic important resources, whereas long-term performance was be related to the partners’ ability to extend and develop the alliance.