국제 전략적 제휴에서 공식적 통제와 비공식적 통제의 역할에 관한 연구

With continued globalization of the world’s economies, strategic alliances have become an important element of many firms’ international strategies. Joint ventures, minority equity stake,coproduction and joint research and development are just some forms of strategic alliances. Although firms increasingly rely on these strategic alliances to explore new global opportunities,few studies have examined the ways in which this collaboration form is governed. Control is a critical concept for successful management and performance of international strategic alliances. Choosing effective control is a must when managing these international relationships. Moreover, the extant literature suggests that control is a key source of confidence in partner cooperation. Firms in alliances tend to be more confident about partner cooperation when they feel they have an adequate level of control over their partners. In this paper, we review prior studies addressing control within strategic alliances, as well as strategic alliances control-performance relationship, and ultimately we attempt to increase our understanding of control mechanisms in international strategic alliances. There are two broad categories of control discussed in the literature: formal control and informal control. Formal control is viewed by organizational researchers as a performance evaluation strategy, where either processes or outcomes are measured, evaluated, and rewarded. This suggests that there are two types of formal control: process-based and outcome-based. On the other hand, informal controls differ from formal controls in that they are based on social or people strategies. One type of informal control is known as social control which utilizes organizational values, norms, and cultures to encourage desirable behavior. Process control provides an effective means to garner partner support, guard against opportunism,and develop a long-term relationship because this control method signals the importance of the alliance to the focal firm and the willingness to share risks. On the other hands, output control reflects the extent to which an alliance firm emphasizes bottom-line results. Sole reliance on this control would reflect an exclusive concern with bottom line, irrespective of the manner in which an alliance firm achieves the results. Also this control provides a compelling individual motivation in that non-producers receive no compensation. However, empirical studies have shown mixed support for the effects of controls on alliance performance. Firms, under a “more control is better” presumption, often hedge their bets by simultaneously using formal and informal controls to govern international strategic alliances. In other words,some researchers contend that formal and informal controls may be complements. However,other researchers who view formal and informal controls as substitutes believe that informal control such as social control based on concrete interfirm trust may govern interfirm exchange effectively. Accordingly, if trust between partners is sufficiently strong to support the use of informal control, the combined use of formal control with informal control could hardly be economical. Therefore, it can be said that there is considerable disagreement about whether the use of one strengthens or diminishes the benefits of the other. Using data from 100 strategic alliances in e-business, it is shown that while process control has positive effects, output control has negative effects on alliance performance. And Informal control plays no facilitating role for process control. In other words, our results support that formal and informal controls function as substitutes in explaining cooperation performance. In addition, we can not find support for institutional explanations of the use of informal control for the alliances with emerging economies firms.