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Article information:To cite this document: Dave Luvison Ard-Pieter de Man , (2015),"Firm performance and alliance capability: the mediating role of culture", Management Decision, Vol. 53 Iss 7 pp. -Permanent link to this document: http://dx. Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:463575 [] For AuthorsIf you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

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Purpose – The aim of this paper is to analyze the way in which organizational culture affects alliance performance. The literature has begun to focus on intra-firm antecedents of alliance success, but so far has mainly focused on structural aspects like the presence of an alliance department. This paper proposes that interrelated processes of sense-making in alliances and sense-making about alliances shape organizational culture to make it more supportive of alliances. Design/methodology/approach – A survey was developed to operationalize an alliance supportive culture construct. Results from 179 alliance managers were analyzed to investigate the inter-relationship of alliance experience, alliance supportive culture and alliance performance. Findings – Alliance supportive culture was found to fully mediate the relationship between alliance experience and performance. This finding suggests that experience with alliances leads to better alliance performance when this experience is translated into the organizational culture. Research limitations/implications – Further research may explore how alliance culture interacts with structural elements of alliance management as identified in the alliance capability literature. The interaction between alliance culture and alliance capability is as yet unexplored. In addition, research may take place to explore which elements determine sense-making about alliances. Practical implications – Managers should not only focus on tools and processes to improve their alliance success. They should also augment the sense-making process about alliances and remove cultural impediments to working with alliances. Originality/value – Many studies have found a relationship between alliance experience and success. This paper shows this is not a direct relationship, but that it operates via cultural change based on sense-making about alliance experience. This mediation effect has not been established before.

Individuals in a firm tend to operate within a unifying set of organizational role expectations, but this is rarely the case in strategic alliances where different organizations' interests and expectations are involved. In this conceptual article, we consider how alliance managers (AMs), the boundary spanners responsible for alliance success, navigate receiving firm-sent role expectations while also receiving legitimate partner-sent expectations. Role theory is incomplete regarding how AMs cope with this increasingly common, mixed-motive context and how the pull of the focal firm on AMs is affected. We address this theory gap by conceptualizing how the limiting nature of firm-sent expectations is affected by AMs' receipt of legitimate partner-sent roles, and is moderated by AMs' entrepreneurism and the structure of the interfirm collaborative environment.