Receiving referrals from alliance partners

The increasing importance of network expansion that often leads to economic benefits directs the current study to examine how relational characteristics such as trust, commitment and communication has influence on referrals among alliance partners. Understanding how these relational characteristics lead to referrals is an important and understudied field. The current research uses an inductive study through 10 organizations with alliance partnership are approached to examine, how the relational characteristics trust, commitment, and communication influence referrals among alliance partners. Comparisons of alliance partnerships in various industries contribute to the generalizability of the propositions that are interrelated to the relational characteristics and influence referrals, including competition, knowledge transmission, support, shared language, and the content of conversations. These factors can be influenced by the referral mechanisms, relational embeddedness and knowledge transmission. Based on the findings, five propositions are formulated. These proposition directs alliance partners to factors that may lead to receiving referrals from alliance partners.The first proposition points out that competition does not stimulate alliance partners to refer their partner. Due to the competition, trust is not stimulated and this effects restrains the alliance partner to refer its partner. Second proposition regards knowledge transmission. It appeared that alliance partners are likely to refer their partner, when their partner transmits valuable knowledge. The third proposition regards the support that an alliance partner can organize in its own organization. Findings indicate that an alliance partner refers their partner when this partner is capable to create involvement on global level. Besides having a key figure appears to be also important for the referring partner, because one would like to be sure that a dedicated contact person is devoted to connect with the necessary persons in the organization for the referral. The fourth proposition regards about speaking the same language with the alliance partner. Absorptive capacity appears to contribute to the occurrence of referrals. The last proposition, content of the conversation with the alliance partner seems to encourage the alliance partners to refer their partner. Important content subjects are insight information and information about the bottlenecks of their collaboration.