What is Resource Complementarity

The literature on cooperative alliances has been criticized for its relatively narrow concentration on large firms and for ignoring small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) alliances where large firms do not operate in similar ways. Due to their size SMEs are more likely to seek external expertise. For small dialysis centers, they often form alliances to obtain these scarce resources. Unlike large firms which own a lot of slack resources to be able to form alliances with many partners, these small dialysis centers tend to form alliances with only a small number of partners and therefore, their dependence on these partners is higher than large firms. Hence, we conducted case study to investigate the use of complementary and supplementary information communication technology (ICT) resources among several small healthcare centers in Taiwan and evaluated how different types of resource alignment affect the performances of alliances. One contribution of the chapter is that the contribution of dissimilar ICT resources by both the focal and partner firms has a significant positive impact on alliance sustainable commitment. The results also reveal that there is a positive relationship between the contribution of dissimilar ICT resources by the partner firms and alliance performance. However, the contribution of dissimilar ICT resources alone by the focal dialysis centers has no significant impact on alliance performance.