The role of internal and perceived alliance management capabilities in supporting international alliance performance of SMEs

International strategic alliances have become an important business management instruments to support the international expansion and to improve the competitiveness of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The puzzling thing is that recent studies have also confirmed that the SMEs' propensity to co-operate is significantly less than the one of large companies. Further, international strategic alliances between SMEs are also characterized by a higher rate of failure (Swoboda et al., 2011).One possible explanation is that SMEs lack of adequate capabilities to manage international alliances as well as a well thought-out relational governance mechanisms (Hoffman & Schlosser, 2001). Early research on strategic alliances highlights the importance of relational governance mechanisms in business partnership, and especially the role of trust as a triggering and a catalyst of the development of long-lasting and mutually satisfactory alliances (Doz, 1996; Ring & Van de Ven, 1994; Das & Teng, 1998; 2001). Vice-versa, more recent literature tends to neglect the dyadic nature of alliances, and to focus more on the existence of specific organizational and managerial capabilities that allow some firms to coordinate strategic alliances better than other firms do and to draw better outcomes from them (Anand & Khanna, 2000; Heimeriks & Duysters, 2007; Schreiner et al., 2009). Hence, while the first perspective is more dyadic oriented and trust-based, the second focuses more on specific individual capabilities of the alliance’s firms. This paper brings together these two different research strands with the aim to came to a more comprehensive explanation of the drivers of the successful management of international strategic alliances by SMEs. An empirical analysis is carried out on a sample of manufacturing SMEs in order to check if, and under which conditions, the individual alliance capabilities of firms and the perception of their partners’ alliance capabilities foster mutual trust and, by thus, alliance performances.