Enacting the alliance: Towards a role-based theory of alliance implementation

Alliance research has tended to neglect the roles of individual managers and employees. However, firms are no unitary actors but complex social systems comprising individuals whose mindsets and interests influence an alliance. Building on organizational role theory we distinguish between three types of role enactment: in-role behavior, extra-role behavior, and perfunctory role behavior, and put forward that these role enactments can have important consequences for interfirm alliances. We use a detailed case study of an alliance between two high-tech firms to explore role enactment of boundary-spanning managers and employees. Our study suggests that individual role enactment can indeed influence alliance implementation in important ways, and we formulate some first theoretical conjectures regarding the antecedents and consequences of in-role, extra-role, and perfunctory role behaviors in interfirm alliances.