Should We Stay or Should We Go? ‘Organizational’ Relational Identity and Identification in Social Venture Strategic Alliances

Abstract

In tackling some of society's most intractable problems, social ventures often engage in strategic alliances to overcome resource constraints and scale their solutions. While considerable research has focused on why strategic alliances are created, less attention has been focused on how they form and why they may (not) persist. Building on an identity-based perspective, this paper develops a theoretical model of strategic alliance development and change by explaining how, and with what results, leaders of social ventures influence the development of organizational identities within their own organizations and strategic alliance partner organizations. The model presented in this paper contributes to the identity literature by developing a cross-level model that explains how individual identities can facilitate the development of organizational identities and by extending the individual-level construct of relational identity to the organizational level by introducing the constructs of ‘organizational’ relational identity and identification. The model contributes to the social entrepreneurship and strategy literatures by suggesting that identity explanations may inform how strategic alliances are formed and why they may (not) persist.

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