The Impact of Alliance Management Capabilities on Alliance Attributes and Performance: A Literature Review

Abstract

The literature on alliances has identified a variety of inter‐firm antecedents of performance, including information and knowledge sharing between partners, shared partner understanding, and a focus on collective objectives. Recent studies have focused on alliance management capabilities (AMC) – firms' abilities to capture, share, store and apply alliance management knowledge – as an important antecedent of performance. This paper reviews 90 studies onAMCand makes two important contributions to the literature. First, the review provides an overview of and classification scheme for the different types ofAMCto better organise the diverse empirical findings that have been presented in the literature. The novel classification distinguishes between general and partner‐specificAMCand betweenAMCstored within the firm and within the alliance. Second, consistent with the dynamic capabilities perspective, this paper offers a more detailed understanding of whyAMCimprove performance, by highlighting the intermediate impact ofAMCon alliance attributes. In particular, the review demonstrates how the different categories ofAMCinfluence alliances in terms of information and knowledge‐sharing between partners, shared partner understanding and the pursuit of collective goals. The review also demonstrates that these attributes improve performance. The authors note promising avenues for future empirical research that involve combining the classification scheme with research on the impact ofAMCon alliance attributes and performance.

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