Leveraging the Dominant Pole: How Champions of an Industry-Wide Environmental Alliance Navigate Coopetition Paradoxes
Date
2024-05-29
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of Management
Abstract
Companies increasingly collaborate with competitors to innovate, minimize risks, and address sustainability crises. However, these alliances often falter or fail due to challenges arising from coopetition paradoxes—contradictory yet interdependent tensions between competition and cooperation. Extant research predominantly focuses on addressing these paradoxes through seeking a stable balance between competition and cooperation; however, we lack in-depth processual understandings of how to navigate these paradoxes as they shift over time. To address this gap in the literature, we analyze longitudinal data over the 3 years it took to establish Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), the unlikely alliance across 13 competitive Canadian oil sands companies to improve their industry’s environmental performance. We noted the role of competition, which we label as the dominant pole—the more powerful of two paradoxical poles—and identify leveraging the dominant pole as a core mechanism for navigating intensifying coopetition paradoxes. Rather than diminishing the dominant competition pole, alliance champions leveraged competition to enable cooperation aided by a paradox mindset. These findings reorient coopetition scholarship away from seeking stability between the two forces, toward a processual understanding of how to navigate the shifting coopetition paradoxes in alliances over time.
Description
This article was originally published in Journal of Management OnlineFirst 2024. © The Author(s) 2024. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241252762. Article Reuse Guidelines https://sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Keywords
paradox, coopetition, strategic alliances, qualitative methods, grand challenges, responsible consumption and production, climate action, partnerships for the goals
Citation
Slawinski, N., Smith, W. K., & Van der Byl, C. A. (2024). Leveraging the Dominant Pole: How Champions of an Industry-Wide Environmental Alliance Navigate Coopetition Paradoxes. Journal of Management, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241252762