What is Resource Dissimilarity

The objective of this chapter is to examine how different types of IS resource alignments affect the performance of alliances via the contribution of dissimilar and similar IS resources. The focus of this study is small healthcare centers in Taiwan. These small healthcare centers have formed alliances to confront the fierce competition as well as to absorb the regulatory pressure from the government. Most of these small healthcare centers in recent years have realized that they can only compete with major healthcare service providers through cooperative alliances, as most of the patients prefer to go to big service providers for longterm treatments. The literature on interorganizational collaborations has been criticized for its relatively narrow concentration on large firms and for ignoring SMEs’ alliances where large firms do not operate in similar ways (Prater & Ghosh, 2005). These cost pressures, together with the general dynamic nature of the healthcare industry, require a significant change in approaches to utilize IS resources by these small healthcare centers. Therefore, these small healthcare centers must form alliances to obtain scarce IS resources. Unlike large firms that own a lot of IS resources to be able to form alliances with many partners, these small healthcare centers tend to form alliances with only a small number of partners, and therefore, their dependence on these partners is higher than large firms (Mambula, 2002). In this regard, these small Taiwanese healthcare centers offer an appropriate context for research.