Explain the Motives Behind Cooperative Strategies of Business Organizations.

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Explain the motives behind cooperative strategies of business organizations. The growth of multinational organisations from the 1950s onwards led to ‘administrative & bureaucratic diseconomies’. Hrebiniak (1992: 399) explains that ‘internal expansion, and the inevitable creation of hierarchy can negatively affect flexibility, speed of response to markets, and the free flow of information so desperately needed to implement global strategies’. These difficulties fuelled the growth of cooperative strategies, such as strategic alliances, joint venture partnerships, buyer-supplier collaborations, and outsourcing arrangements. A cooperative strategy is defined as ‘a strategy in which firms work together to achieve a shared objective’ (Hitt, et al., 2008:246). There are many motives behind the use of co-operative strategies. Dekker (2004) recognised that firms would be motivated to establish inter-organizational relationship (IOR) if they resulted in ‘mutually beneficial outcomes’. He carried out an investigation into a strategic alliance between a buyer (RIB) and supplier (NMA) of railway safety equipment, for the supply of automatic half barrier installations. RIB’s management was motivated to interact with NMA because of foreseeable ‘cost reductions’ in their supply chain. The strategic alliance made it possible to reduce the number of firms in RIB’s supply chain hence reducing ‘significant inefficiencies’ by eliminating ‘non value-added costs’ (Dekker, 2004: 38). In addition to this, Cooper and Slagmulder (2004) also state that ‘the outsourcing of significant items introduces the problem of information asymmetry […] which causes the buyer to establish specifications that unnecessarily increase the costs incurred by the supplier’ (2004:1). This instigates ‘buyer-supplier interactions […] to identify opportunities for cost reduction’. Another motive identified
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