ABSTRACT
The alliance management stage confronts alliance partners with the next challenge: monitor and coordinate alliance activities, and if required impose changes, to the purpose of creating value-creating conditions and mitigating the potential threat of exchange hazards. To inform their alliance management, managers need to recognize how to deploy a range of soft approaches. This chapter provides the relationship between alliance design and alliance management, and a systematic framework and decision-making steps for alliance management. Alliance management encompasses both organizational and inter-organizational routines, systems and procedures that make an alliance work. The chapter discusses four alliance management approaches that suggest unique perspectives on how to deal with the soft side of alliance management: relational governance, conflict management, response strategies and inter-partner learning. Relational governance theory offers a valuable complement to classical contracting by emphasizing the importance of social and relational processes as building blocks of efficient and effective alliances. The chapter concludes with a summary and a case illustration.
