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Abstract:
This study examines the relationship between firms' alliance contracts complexity and the performance the firms extract from their portfolio of strategic alliances. Based on a statistical analysis of 46 large and medium size companies in Romania we found a positive, medium intensity and statistically significant correlation between these constructions. However, we found that this relationship is significant only for the innovation related performances and productivity related ones (such as profits, market share etc.). It means, we observed that the companies using more complex alliance contracts have no more strategic alliances that achieve their initial goals, but they do increase their innovations and productivity related performances. When we controlled for the firm's size and relational capital we found that the firm's size does not moderates the relationship between contracts' complexity and firm's performance. On the other hand, we found that relational attributes such as trust, mutual understanding etc., do influence the relationship, in the sense that it is weakened, until the point is not anymore significant. We suspect that that the use of alliance contracts and relational attributes rather than substitute, may in fact complement each other. Large and medium size companies in Romania (but can be the case also for companies operating in other emerging markets similar to Romania) obtaining better innovations and productivity related performances from their collaborative strategies use both: complex contracts and relational attributes. However, the alliance contracts complexity individual, and per se, explains very little why some companies obtain better productivity related and innovative performances. Hence, the alliance contracts are not so important as believed for firm's performance.
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