The two facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination in strategic alliances

This paper unpacks two underspecified facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination. Prior research has emphasized cooperation, specifically partners’ commitment and alignment of interests, as the key determinant of collaborative success. Scholars have paid less attention to the critical role of coordination—the effective alignment and adjustment of partners’ actions. To redress this imbalance, we conceptually disentangle cooperation and coordination in the context of inter-organizational collaboration, and examine how the two phenomena play out in the partner selection, design, and post-formation stages of an alliance’s life cycle.