Examining Alliance Portfolios Beyond the Dyads: The Relevance of Redundancy and Nonuniformity Across and Between Partners

In this research, we unpack how interdependencies affect not just individual dyads but also value creation across an alliance portfolio and ultimately a focal firm’s performance. Moving beyond the collection of dyadic relationships of individual alliances, we examine more holistically the distribution of power imbalances and mutual dependences within alliance portfolios, as well as the impact of redundancies in portfolio partners’ resources. Building on resource dependence theory, we develop and test arguments on a sample of 59 firms in the U.S. passenger airline industry during 1998–2011. We find that nonuniform distributions of power imbalances and mutual dependences within the alliance portfolio as well as redundancy affect firm performance in different ways, which has implications for the management of alliance portfolios.