Business Alliance & Partnership Performance and its Value Drivers: an Intellectual Capital Approach

This paper contributes to the field of alliance research by extending and testing the research framework of Moeller (2006) in a specific research setting. Singularly relating behavioral value drivers to financial performance of alliances ignores intangible performance components. This research shows that behavioral value drivers directly affect alliance performance and, additionally, indirectly affect intangible performance. The direct relationship to tangible performance is found to be positively significant for six value drivers: trust, commitment, open communication, strategic interdependence, participation, and coordination of work. The only variable not being significant is the one of symmetry.The indirect relationship by means of intangible performance shows a positive effect of the value drivers of open communication, strategic interdependence, participation, and coordination of work. Overall, symmetry does not have any impact on performance. The closely related drivers of trust and of commitment are important for the overall performance of business partnerships but do not increase the performance of specific intangible components.