A PLS model of strategic networks and organizational performance: Based on environmental turbulence, information technology, and transaction costs

Strategic networks and alliances have been recurrent topics in recent years in the business policy and strategy literature. At the same time, information technology has been frequently linked to competitive advantage of firms in achieving successful outsourcing and inter-organizational relationships in both the popular and academic literature in many fields. Today, the most successful enterprises are looking beyond their corporate boundaries. They recognize the advantage and the necessity of creating special business relationships with external enterprise due to high technological and competitive environmental turbulence. Theoretical and empirical studies in strategic management have conducted research on these new forms of network organizations. A few of these studies have emphasized the close relationship that exists between this type of organizational or inter-organizational structures and information technology. Where information technologies are the enabling forces behind many of these alliances. All these studies deal with governance structure, transaction costs, and information technology issues in a separate manner. There is no previous research that treats the predictive or causal behavior among these concepts in an integrated manner; and there is no model in the literature that relates organizational performance with strategic networks using theories of transaction cost, information technology and environmental turbulence. This study proposes hypotheses of an integrated causal-predictive model that relates strategic networks with information technology, transaction costs, environmental turbulence, and organizational performance. An exploratory research approach is used based on the Holistic Construal methodology of Bagozzi, with multivariate partial least square techniques known as PLS to prove the hypotheses proposed.