Alliance Portfolio Diversity and Market Performance: The Moderating Role of Strategic Orientation

Description

Acknowledging existing ambiguity about the performance consequences of diversity within a firm’s alliance portfolio, this study offers a more nuanced perspective on the multidimensional construct and investigates the effect of knowledge domain diversity, partner type diversity and governance diversity on a firm’s market performance. We also advance existing theory on the contingent value of alliance portfolio configurations by analyzing the moderating effect of a firm’s strategic orientation. Using a longitudinal dataset from the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, our results show that while the diversity of alliance-related attributes has an inverted u-shape relationship with market performance, partner type diversity constitutes a managerial burden for most of the firms investigated and with the exception of large exploitation-oriented firms negatively impacts their performance. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence that an alignment between a firm’s strategic orientation and the diversity of its alliance portfolio positively influences market performance because ‘explorers’ and ‘exploiters’ have different requirements when accessing external resources.

Period	9 Aug 2019 → 13 Aug 2019
Event title	Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Event type	Unknown
Degree of Recognition	International