Alliance Network Diversity and Social Capital Mobilization an Empirical Study of the Global Airline Industry

Firms establish a presence in a wide range of alliances to access the critical resources that they may need at any one time. Although inter-organizational relationships constitute the channels through which social capital flows, firms should consider which mechanisms or characteristics of the relations facilitate their actual mobilization. Accordingly, the final purpose of alliances cannot simply be potential access to partner resources, it must also be their real use. A definition of alliance types yielded the parameters for an ordinary least squares regression of a sample from top international airline databases. The results showed that certain kind of alliances favored the actual mobilization of social capital. Accordingly, cooperation as a structural organizational form, and in particular certain types of alliances such as global or multilateral, makes it easier to cope with increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments -VUCA conditions.