Strategic Alliances and Social Value Co-Creation: The Roles of Resources Complementarity and Organizational Culture

Abstract

Value co-creation has been endorsed as an active strategic response to diverse organizations’ resources and capability deficiencies. However, extant research has principally centered on for-profit value co-creation context compared to not-for-profit value co-creation, offering less insight into severely under-resourced social enterprise context. Grounded by the relational view of competitive advantage, we explore how strategic alliances influence social value co-creation while examining the interaction effects of resource complementarity and organizational culture. We tested our hypotheses using 123 social enterprises in Nigeria. We found that strategic alliance positively influences social value co-creation and is positively mediated by resource complementarity. Organizational culture negatively moderates the nexus between resource complementarity and social value co-creation, weakening the nexus.Based on the findings, we suggest that social entrepreneurs may sustain social value co-creation, when they consider actors with distinct but complementary resources while breaking away from their preexisting organizational culture since it directly impedes resource complementarity behavior.

Keywords: Social value co-creation, strategic alliances, complementary resources, organizational culture