Laura Poppo

University of Kansas | KU · School of Business

Strategy management as a phenomenon needs greater integration in order to clarify and progress knowledge development and accumulation (Durand, Grant, and Madsen 2017). In this paper we integrate three canonical pillars of strategy: 1) how to firms differ from other firms, 2) why a firm organization differs from a market organization, and 3) the pro...

Several decades of alliance research have examined management of the opposing competitive and cooperative tensions inherent to the alliance context. The firm-level mechanisms of relational governance, trust, and contracts are widely discussed, but far less attention is given to the individual members of the alliance team and their experience of the...

Cambridge Core - Strategic Management - Frontiers of Strategic Alliance Research - edited by Farok J. Contractor

Frontiers of Strategic Alliance Research - edited by Farok J. Contractor March 2019

Competition and cooperation are central opposing tensions in the context of alliances. For cooperation to flourish, members of an interorganizational alliance group must perceive the shared alliance interest as more salient than other competing interests. In this chapter, we provide a social psychological solution to this challenge, an established...

Our research empirically assesses two distinct bases for trust: calculative trust, based on a structure of rewards and penalties, versus relational trust, a judgment anchored in past behavior and characterized by a shared identity. We find that calculative trust and relational trust positively influence supplier performance, with calculative trust...

Despite the centrality of fairness in the moral and social fabric of governance, few studies relate fairness to contracting research. This paper assesses whether fairness accounts for the effects of contractual complexity and contractual recurrence on exchange performance. Based on a sample of 283 buyer–supplier dyads, we find that procedural fairn...

Building on institutional and transaction cost economics, this article proposes that legal enforceability increases the use of contract over relational reliability (e.g., beliefs that the other party acts in a non-opportunistic manner) to safeguard market exchanges characterized by non-trivial hazards. The results of 399 buyer–supplier exchanges in...

This research focuses on relational and contractual mechanisms and examines their impact on foreign subsidiaries' acquisition of tacit and explicit knowledge from local suppliers. Using survey data from 168 foreign subsidiaries operating in China, this study finds broad support for the proposed analytical framework. When the foreign subsidiary and...

In the previous chapter, Lacity and Willcocks found that 61 actual IT outsourcing (ITO) decisions did not map well to Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). Our findings were initially written in 1995 when large scale ITO decisions were still novel. As time progressed, other researchers found better results with ITO tests of TCE propositions. For exampl...

Despite recognition of the benefits of relational governance in inter-organizational exchanges, factors that may erode its value have received little examination. We extend the literature by asking whether self-interested opportunities and long-standing ties erode the positive association between relational governance and performance. Consistent wi...

While most advocate that foreign firms should utilize managerial ties to conduct business in China, recent literature cautions that such ties may offer only conditional value. This study examines three sources of heterogeneity that may condition the value of ties: firm ownership (foreign vs. domestic), competition, and structural uncertainty. Resul...

As business transactions become more complex in China – an increasingly market-driven economy – are managers more likely to employ relational ties or contracts? Consistent with the view that personal institutions govern transactions in China, our analysis of 361 buyer–supplier exchanges indicates that managers rely more on relational ties as asset...

Despite the widespread acceptance of trust as an informal governance institution, our understanding of its origins is nascent. Our review of the literature identified two distinct explanations: Trust emerges from either a shadow of the past (i.e., prior history) or a shadow of the future (i.e., expectations of continuity). In this paper we develop...

This empirical paper explores economic and social origins of relational governance. Previous empirical research has provided substantial support for the positive relationship between exchange hazards (such as transaction specific assets or decision uncertainty) and relational governance. In contrast, we use transaction cost economics to argue that...

This empirical study shows: 1) long-standing social ties and long-term contracts underlies the formation of relational governance, 2) asset specificity and measurement dampen the effectiveness of relational governance, and 3) performance declines with long-standing social ties (controlling for relational governance).

In this paper, we dismiss the traditional contingency argument that corporate staff should have minimal involvement with the decisions that its divisions make, because predictability, which underlies this contingency logic, is erroneous for most large corporations at this time. We offer an alternative theory of corporate involvement for the M-form:...

Relational exchange arrangements supported by trust are commonly viewed as substitutes for complex contracts in interorganizational exchanges. Many argue that formal contracts actually undermine trust and thereby encourage the opportunistic behavior they are designed to discourage. In this paper, we develop and test an alternative perspective: that...

Exchanges are governed by a set of formal institutions (contracts, incentives, authority) and informal institutions (norms, routines, political processes) which are deeply intertwined. However, for the most part, informal institutions are treated as exogenous forces which change the benefits to using alternative formal structures, and formal instit...

This paper examines a nearly untested premise of the resource-based view of the firm: managers can exploit uncertainty about a factor's true value to generate returns. Our results show that empirically validating this basic proposition is difficult and potentially impossible, despite our use of a rather simple empirical setting. While market imperf...

Transaction cost economics advocates that greater exchange hazards be met either with more tightly crafted contracts or, when the costs of crafting and enforcing complex contracts are sufficiently high, with vertical integration. However, many argue that transaction cost economics vastly overstates the need for either integration or contractual saf...

Firms' boundary choices have undergone careful examination in recent years, particularly in information services. While transaction cost economics provides a widely tested explanation for boundary choice, more recent theoretical work advances competing knowledge-based and measurement cost explanations. Similar to transaction cost economics, these t...

Firms boundary choices have undergone careful examination in recent years, particularly in information services. While transaction cost economics provides a widely tested explanation for boundary choice, more recent theoretical work advances competing knowledge-based and measurement cost explanations. Similar to transaction cost economics, these th...

This paper examines empirically two distinctions of internal and external markets: influence activities and strategic coordination. Influence activities that arise from decentralization, imperfect monitoring, and a relative performance system are a potential liability of internal markets, coordination may be worse in internal markets than in extern...

Firms' boundary choices have undergone careful examination in recent years, particularly in information services. While transaction cost economics provides a widely tested explanation for boundary choice, more recent theoretical work advances competing knowledge-based and measurement cost explanations. Similar to transaction cost economics, these t...