Making it happen: The pivotal role of knowledge sharing for information technology deployment success during joint venture change

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2198
• Date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Gareth R. T. White,Sally Eaves1,Vikas Kumar,John Loonam
• Published date: 01 May 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2198

Strategic Change. 2018;27(3):245–255. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jsc © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 245

Abstract

Tacit and explicit knowledge sharing must be connually culvated to enable informaon tech-

nology implementaon success. Eecve informaon technology deployment necessitates a

holisc focus beyond technical and legacy factors to include social, organizaonal, polical, and

interpersonal dimensions. Aenon to cultural integraon is a crical component of managing

joint venture change and building employee engagement, percepon of legimacy and knowl-

edge sharing norms. Individual employees occupy a key role in determining intended strategic

impacts by comming to and enacng change eorts, parcularly though making discreonary

decisions to share their knowledge or alternavely to hoard, hide or disengage from sharing; an

outcome which may be inuenced by percepons on knowledge ownership and value.

1 

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 INTRODUCTION

In an environment of accelerang complexity (Hempel & Marnsons,

2009), organizaons are connually challenged by strategic renewal

(Ben‐Menahem, Kwee, Volberda, & Van Den Bosch, 2013) to ensure

ongoing ecacy and business survival and moreover, to idenfy their

next source of growth. Choices include growing organically, through

merger and acquision, or by the formaon of alliances such as joint

venture companies (Reinartz, Dellaert, Kra, Kumar, & Varadarajan,

2011). Collaborave intercorporate arrangements are increasingly

popular with 44,000 transacons totaling more than 2.9 trillion GBP

recorded in 2015 alone (Instute of Mergers, Acquisions and Alli-

ances, 2016). Despite this popularity, such strategic moves do not

come without risk and uncertainty. Many fail to actualize their poten-

al (Ariño & de la Torre, 1998) and lead to poor performance or even

early terminaon (Cui & Kumar, 2012) due to the inherent complexity

that organizaonal integraon involves (Beamish & Lupton, 2009).

Of all types of strategic alliance, joint ventures are second only to

merger in the level of integraon required (Todeva & Knoke, 2005).

Movaon to partner can span organizaonal, economic, technologi-

cal, strategic, and polical dimensions but the overarching intent of

such a move is broadly to enable the pares concerned to share risk

and create sustainable value (Doz & Hamel, 1999) through the syn-

ergies that emerge when complementary capabilies are combined

(Oxley & Sampson, 2004). Inter‐rm cooperave agreements also

provide opportunies for new knowledge access, exchange and orga-

nizaonal learning (Khamseh & Jolly, 2008). Within telecommunica-

ons, a technology‐based raonale is parcularly strong, for example

to run, enhance, and share network infrastructure (KPMG, 2009) but

the complexity of integraon required remains challenging (Åberg &

Sias, 2004), parcularly in relaon to legacy systems.

The case study provides an example of a related joint venture that

is typically orientated toward the sharing, opmizaon and integraon

of extant resources to leverage economies of scope and scale, rather

than aiming to learn vastly new capabilies or understand new mar-

kets (Cui & Kumar, 2012). To deliver an integral organizaon that can

achieve its intended strategic impacts requires radical change (Gersick,

1994) which is problemac to realize (Palmer & Dunford, 2002) and

can result in high rates of failure (Oreg, Vakola, & Armenakis, 2011).

Eecve mechanisms to manage and combine shared resources and

facilitate mullevel exchange (Inkpen, 2000; Kogut, 1988; Wei, Choy,

& Yew, 2009) become ever crical, parcularly the idencaon,

transfer, and internalizaon of tacit, collecve and embedded knowl-

edge (Todeva & Knoke, 2005).

Making it happen: The pivotal role of knowledge sharing for

informaon technology deployment success during joint

venture change*

Sally Eaves1 | Vikas Kumar2 | Gareth R. T. White3 | John Loonam4

1Aston Business School, Aston University,

Birmingham, United Kingdom

2Bristol Business School, University of the

West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom

3Faculty of Business and Society, University

of South Wales, Pontypridd, Wales, United

Kingdom

4Dublin City University Business School,

Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

Correspondence

Sally Eaves, Aston Business School, Aston

University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK.

Email: sally@sallyeaves.com

* JEL classicaon codes: D83, L10, L24, M15, O33.