Influence of cultural mechanisms on horizontal inter-firm collaborations
Abstract: The evolution of
organizations that work in multinational environments has considerably altered
their production strategies. One of the consequences has been the appearance of
Horizontal Inter-firm Collaborations (HICs), which include all kinds of
enterprises and production centres and establish a new type of horizontal
collaborations and relations between independent companies or even competitors
who establish occasional collaborations on projects they could not take on
individually. HICs are dynamically changing organizations formed by Original
Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Contract Manufacturers (CMs), turn-key and
component suppliers, R+D centres and distributors. The dynamic relations that
exist within the HICs allow them a very permeable organization easy to connect
and disconnect from one to each other as well as to choose a set of partners
with specific attributes. The result is a highly flexible system characterized
by low barriers to entry and exit, geographic flexibility, low costs, rapid
technological diffusion, high diversification through contract manufacturers
and exceptional economies of scale. This study of organizational culture at the
network level includes aspects such as cultural similarity among its actors,
social embeddedness, tacit knowledge transfer or the importance of trust
atinter-firm collaborations. The presence, under a systemic perspective, of
homogeneous cultural values and practices in which collaboration actors can be
identified may strengthen the group membership or establish a social network
that underlies the own HIC and facilitates interactions among its members. The
feasibility of this approach would facilitate the formation of new HICsby
establishing, ex ante, a cultural prescriptive model at the network level.
Finally, to validate the proposed model, the case methodology have been applied
to an example within the aeronautical industry that has been one of the most
successful relationships within HICs, the collaboration between GE and SNECMA
for the CFM 56 engine manufacturing.
Keywords: horizontal
inter-firm collaborations, aeronautic industry, GE, SNECMA
Author: José Ramón Vilana,
Carlos RodrÃguez Monroy
Journal Code: jptindustrigg100015
