The attributes of coopetitive relationships: What do we know and not know about them?

Abstract

Coopetition is well recognized by scholars and highly valued by practitioners. Nonetheless, although we know a lot about the antecedents and effects of this fast-growing phenomenon, we do not know much about the relationships through which it is exploited. This paper addresses this gap by identifying and categorizing the attributes of coopetitive relationships used when coopetition is utilized. As a review paper, it follows a two-step approach in which two rounds of the literature review were implemented. First, a review of existing reviews (i.e. an umbrella review and a meta-systematic review) was conducted to confirm the knowledge gaps and pose research questions. Second, a domain-based systematic literature review was run to find out what coopetitive relationship attributes are described in research, if (and how) these attributes can be categorized and finally what remains unknown about them. Subsequently, the application of frequency and content-centric thematic analyses allowed us to identify 24 attributes of coopetitive relationships, but also to categorize them based on their complexity level (i.e. 2 constitutive, 6 first-order and 16 s-order attributes) and the type of inter-organizational relationships characterized by them (i.e. 7 relational attributes distinguished for coopetition versus 17 related to both cooperative and coopetitive inter-organizational relationships).

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