The General Manager's Perspective On How Factionalism Can Impact the Behaviors and Effectiveness of Top Managers Inside A Shared Management Joint Venture

This research is focused on joint ventures that are operated with a shared management governance structure. It is argued that the effectiveness of top management inside such a joint venture will be significantly determined by the nature of relations between the managers transferred from the different parent firms. Within that context, emphasis is placed on relational factors that can have an important bearing on the quality of decision making inside the joint venture. Data is collected from top executives at seventy-five shared management joint ventures and the results suggest several significant linkages. First, a growing sense of ``us'' versus ``them'' factionalism between managers from different parent companies is associated with a heightened propensity for the use of power in an impersonal and manipulative way. Second, those attitudes and behaviors undermine the openness of communications and information exchanges between the managers. Third, as those attitudes and behaviors intensify they have increasingly dysfunctional consequences for the development and execution of high quality decisions, and management effectiveness deteriorates. Moreover, interdependence between the managers aggravates this phenomenon because it strengthens the link between negative attitudes and dysfunctional behavior. The implications for joint venture performance are evident. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000