eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

This thesis explores what makes licensing partnerships with diverse corporate cultures successful and wherein lie the challenges of having different corporate cultures. Corporate cultures have been named  as  one  of the key reasons behind the success or failure of mergers and acquisitions, but there is far less research on the impact of corporate cultures in partnerships, which makes it a relevant topic to research. The research objective is to create a better understanding of what factors facilitate a successful cross-corporate cultural partnership between the case company team and its licensing partners, but to also identify specific challenges  that  corporate culture clashes create. Despite the many descriptions found in the literature review, this thesis uses "how things are done at the workplace" as the definition for corporate culture, since it is how the respondents themselves describe it.

The research method consists of an online survey, including a prominent  tool used for culture mapping, i.e. the organizational culture assessment  instrument (OCAI) and the competing values framework, which the case company team and its partners responded to, as well as personal interviews conducted with the case company team. Thematic networks analysis  was  used to discuss the findings. As it turns out, the OCAI results were not as valuable for this research as the open?ended questions and interviews, which revealed a lot of insightful information about the role of corporate cultures in partnerships as well as the cornerstones of a working partnership with the case company team.

According to the empirical research conducted for this case study, corporate cultures impact partnerships in both good and bad ways: they can create synergies that help all parties reach their  goals  faster, but at times they slow down cooperation. Many partner respondents claimed that even though they employ a completely different culture than the case company team, both according to the OCAI outcome as well as the partners themselves, they are still content with their collaboration, as are those who believe they have similar organizational cultures, questioning the notion of only similar cultures working well together. In this case study, partnership success factors seem to circle around the following elements: open and friendly communication about the mutual projects at hand and their progress, fast response times, focus on high quality, working towards common goals, acting professionally as well as valuing  their  partnership  relationships. Many of these were also mentioned when asked about the impact of organizational cultures on their partnership relationship.