LEADERSHIP STYLES IN STRATEGIC ALLIANCES

Phuoc D. Nguyen

Schweitzer (2013) presented transformational leadership and transactional leadership styles in strategic alliances. Miller and Miller (n.d.) presented leadership styles of contingency, transaction, tradition, charisma, transformation, servant, and collaboration in collaborative work.

Schweitzer (2013) indicated “Leading an alliance team involves unique challenges: Firms often design alliances to have a shared leadership function, informal leadership structures can evolve, and some managers might be engaged in multiple alliance teams, facing different contingencies in every one of them” (p. 444). Strategic alliances of human resources include professionals from different national cultures, company cultures, values, and beliefs. In this context, the collaborative leadership style is appropriate to lead the strategic alliance. Veale (2010 stated, “If the collaborative leader promotes treating each other as equals, then the staff would more likely collaborate with each other even when the leader is absent” (p. 150). Employees in a strategic alliance are treated equally which will create a high spirit of cooperation among employees, and staff’s team-working and cross-functional cooperation are high. Collaborative leaders should pay attention to and understand six insights including getting the right mindset, reducing transaction costs, seeing beyond the borders of the organization, building consensus, ability to network, and managing the dualities (De Meyer, 2010). Insights of building consensus and ability to network are to build the relationship and communicate management and leadership and to unify opinions in the strategic alliance; managing the dualities to improve the strategic alliance’s performance and to avoid bias in the strategic alliance; bias is human nature so strategic alliances need a procedure to monitor them.

The Collaborative Leadership Model includes the eight leadership themes of Authentic Self-Awareness, Passion/Charisma/Personal Vision, Relationship Building, Facilitating the Process, Communication for Understanding, Consultative Decision-Making, Forging Group Vision, and Management for Action. The model has also included four elements of the collaborative leadership style of Traits and Characteristics, Interpersonal Skills, Intergroup Processes, and Action (Miller and Miller, n.d.).

Leadership themes of Authentic Self-Awareness, Passion/Charisma/Personal Vision are related to elements of Traits and Characteristics of the Collaborative Leadership Model. Thus, based on the strategic alliance’s strategic goals; life cycle stages of strategic alliance; and alliance parties’ culture, values, and beliefs we can integrate traits and characteristics of leadership styles of authenticity, transformation, conversation, contingency, transaction, charisma, and servant into elements of Traits and Characteristics of the Collaborative Leadership Model to coordinate the collaborative leadership with leadership styles of authentic, transformation, conversation, contingency, transaction, charisma, and servant together.