Does Accommodating a Self-Serving Partner in an International Marketing Alliance Pay Off?

This research examines a firm's performance in an international marketing alliance when it responds to a self-serving partner's exploitive behavior with accommodation, a cooperative response motivated by the firm's commitment to the venture. The authors theorize that a wronged firm's payoff from accommodation depends on its approach to monitoring, either employing overt surveillance or relying on its partner's self-control. Overt surveillance is believed to undermine accommodation's ability to convince a selfish partner that cooperation is beneficial and not inconsistent with its self-interest. In contrast, because no or low monitoring is a relational approach to evaluation, it tends to reinforce accommodation, persuading a competitive partner to reciprocate cooperatively. Data collected from 174 international marketing alliances support the authors’ prediction that under low monitoring, accommodation is positively associated with performance in the alliance. Unexpectedly, under high monitoring, performance is greatest under both low and high accommodation. An explanation may lie in accommodation theory's notion that as accommodation increases, a selfish partner transitions from competition to cooperation, ceasing to exploit accommodation and upturning performance.