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This research paper investigates the process of forming strategic partnerships to enact organizational change. There has been increasing interest in forming strategic partnerships in higher education due to a variety of motivations, such as pooling of resources and improving the professional development process for students (Worrall, 2007). It is important to examine how strategic partnerships form because the process of formation sets the objectives and expectations of the relationship, which in turn impact the likelihood of success and sustainability of the relationship. Further, despite the growing interest in forming strategic partnerships, the majority of these partnerships fail (Eddy, 2010). This analysis of strategic partnerships emerges from our participatory action research with university change agents activated through the NSF REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) Program. Through an NSF-funded collaboration between [University 1] and [University 2], we work with the change-making teams to investigate the change process and provide just-in-time training and support. Utilizing qualitative data from focus group discussions and observations of monthly cross-team teleconference calls, we examine the importance of motivations, social capital, and organizational capital in the process of forming strategic partnerships. We find that change-making teams have utilized a variety of strategies to establish goals and governance within strategic partnerships. These strategies include establishing alignment among institutional goals, project goals, and partner organization goals. Further, the strategic partnerships that have been most successful have occurred when teams have intentionally built mutually beneficial relationships and invited their partner into the visioning process for their change projects. These results delineate practices for initiating strategic partnerships within higher education and encourage faculty to build mutually beneficial strategic partnerships.
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This content will become publicly available on March 4, 2026
A Temporally Contingent View of Dynamic Managerial Capabilities
ABSTRACT This article contributes to research on dynamic managerial capabilities, which examines managerial impact on firms' strategic change. Specifically, we study the role of managerial social capital—a key underpinning of dynamic managerial capabilities—in organizations' strategic change. We propose a temporally contingent account that elucidates how the fitness of dynamic managerial capabilities unfolds across life cycle stages and varying degrees of change pressures. We start by testing our theoretical model using data on 20,593 individuals in 5522 new ventures over a period of 5 years. A key insight from our quantitative analysis is that dynamic managerial capabilities are particularly valuable during convergent periods, when both external pressures to accomplish strategic change and inertial forces are increasing. Our subsequent interpretivist study, aimed at elaborating the mechanisms underlying the social capital‐funding effect, reveals that the types of resources and strategic changes spurred by social capital differ markedly across time. Overall, our paper enriches dynamic capabilities scholarship by highlighting that the effects of these capabilities are substantially time‐variant.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1943688
- PAR ID:
- 10577022
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Managerial and Decision Economics
- ISSN:
- 0143-6570
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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