How do Alliances Emerge as Mini Societies? Social Construction Processes of Negative Alliance Events

Although episodes of negative events in the life cycle of alliances are common, understanding how they might impact the persistence or termination of alliances remains limited. In this study, we develop a process model to explain how partners socially construct and attribute causes to such events which ultimately decide the fate of their partnership. We argue that alliance conditions – specifically trust, dependence, and alliance experience – lead to a set of social construction processes that, in turn, influence the attributions of the negative event. We theorize that the alliance’s unique cultural dynamics morph into a mini society, which in turn governs the critical processes of interpretive intensity, collaborative flexibility, and an iterative bilateral negotiation. As a consequence, the partners form attributions that culminate in alliance termination (with a partner attribution), continuation (with an external attribution), and reconfiguration (with a relational attribution). Our contribution lies principally in going beyond either an individual partner or even a dyadic level to portray the alliance as a mini society with its own unique cultural dynamic and, indeed, its entitativity. By conceiving alliance processes as socially-constructed responses to a negative event, we provide a theory of how alliances might strengthen as an outcome of negative events.