Strategic alliance temporalities and partner opportunism

The troubling potential for opportunistic behaviour in strategic alliances is acknowledged in both research and practice, and yet the antecedents of such opportunism remain largely unexplored in the literature. In this article we suggest that the inherent temporalities of alliances play significant roles in partner opportunism. We propose a model of potential partner opportunism that assigns antecedent and contingent roles to the temporal horizons of alliances and the temporal orientations of the member firms. We introduce the notion of alliance horizons and suggest that they are constituted by the temporal orientations of the member firms and a number of common alliance formation factors. We also discuss how these alliance horizons in conjunction with the temporal orientations of member firms result in different levels of potential opportunism. Lastly, we develop a number of propositions to facilitate empirical research on the temporal contingencies of partner opportunism and indicate directions for further studies.