Question

Discuss and apply the OD process to alliance formation and development.

Answer 1

Answer:

An alliance is established when two or more organizations mutually see collaboration as beneficial, so organizational goals and external opportunities jointly determine alliance formation. The logic of matching theory is that organizations form alliances with a mutual fit of resources. For a match to occur, it is not enough that a given organization needs to obtain a certain resource—an organization holding that resource must also need something that the given organization can provide in return. The distribution of organizational characteristics in a population creates the pool of prospective alliance partners, which determines how close to the ideal partner each organization can get. This model allows serendipity in the matching process (Kilduff & Tsai, 2003), but also lets organizational goals and resources affect choices so that realized alliances will match organizational characteristics better than random encounters of organizations would have.

The match quality is determined by the availability of partners with the desired characteristics, so matches are expected to be worse when actors look for rare characteristics than for common ones. Hence, matching theory does not assume that matches will be perfect, only as good as availability allows; and likewise the methodology tests observed matches against randomly drawn matches to control for the

availability constraint