Paper Title
The Effects of Cooperation and Coopetition from a Relational View Perspective
Abstract
Inter firm collaboration in dyads and networks brings companies many benefits but also involves the risk of collaboration. From a relational view perspective and the associated concept of a value network the collaboration can be expressed by cooperation or coopetition depending on the type of partners. Cooperation is a kind of collaboration with non-competitive partners (i.e. suppliers, customers, complementors), while coopetition is a kind of collaboration with competitive partners (i.e. competitors) by which simultaneous cooperation and competition between enterprises are implied. Those both types of cross-organizational dynamics can bring positive and negative results. The aim of this paper is an identification of the effects of the interfirm cooperation and coopetition in the context of a group of partners and character of cooperation (i.e. partnership or transactional). The research was carried out on a representative sample of 400 enterprises operating in Poland and on international markets, which is representative of the company’s size. The research tool was a standardized questionnaire, which was filled in by the owners or representatives of the top management. The findings show that higher positive effects from cooperation with suppliers, customers, and complementors are in the case of partnership cooperation than a transactional one. This is particularly evident for resource, financial and organizational effects. Coopetition was undertaken by a few companies, and among them, higher positive effects were obtained by those which coopete on their own initiative than those which accepted the offer from competitors. At the same time, those enterprises that indicated a lack of coopetition rated individual effects from the relational strategy implementation below. In the case of negative effects, only a few companies indicated their existence, and the vast majority of respondents do not notice them. This paper contributes to the literature on interfirm collaboration by showing the effects, the kind of collaboration can bring.
Keywords - Collaboration, Cooperation, Coopetition, Relational View, Value Network, Benefits, Risks