Unpacking Alliance Management Capabilities in Cross-Sector Collaboration

Alliance management capabilities (AMCs) are typically regarded as higher-order resources that can affect an organization’s ability to derive value from inter-organizational collaboration. Extant research has predominantly focused on business-to-business relationships. In this paper, we examine AMCs in a nontraditional (non-market) context: nongovernment-business collaboration (NBC). Furthermore, we assess AMCs from the perspective of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Using qualitative data obtained from interviews with 38 employees (who represented 26 UK-based NGOs), along with evidence from organizational documents, we identified three distinct groups of NGO-specific AMCs: pre-collaboration, post-collaboration, and hybrid capabilities. These capabilities embody the way in which NGOs attract, establish, and manage collaborative linkages with businesses. In particular, the hybrid capabilities, which are utilized before and during the collaboration, emphasize the importance of learning processes and stakeholder management throughout the collaboration process. More general, the findings show that NGOs leverage their AMCs through two strategic actions, namely exploring and exploiting, which contributes to the Resource-Based View theory by explaining the pathway between capabilities and realized value.