International strategic alliances: A research on determining the success factors of international strategic alliances operating in the lodging industry in Turkey

The increase in complexity and uncertainty of internal and external environments of enterprises in recent years, change in market conditions, technological developments, intense increase in competition and short lasting product life cycles directed the managers to review the traditional methods and strategies they use. In this direction, international strategic alliances -within the network organization structure- have started to develop as quite attractive structures for enterprises that face with the pressure of forming and sustaining global competitive advantage on implementing their operations successfully.International strategic alliances have an important place in enterprises? strategic plans. They are structures that are formed by minimum two partners coming from different countries, who are willing to benefit from the advantages of co-operating. Regarding the advantages they reveal, the number of international strategic alliances are in increase that are formed for different objectives like attaining new technologies or markets, distributing the risk, diversifying the business and reducing the uncertainties. Although they have numerous advantages for partner enterprises, due to various reasons the formed strategic alliances show poor performance.According to research results almost about more than half of the strategic alliances fail or end up with dissatisfaction of the partners (Whipple and Frankel, 2000; Park and Ungson, 2001; Kale et al., 2001; Kelly et al. 2002; Campione, 2003; Xie and Johnston, 2004; Hitt et al., 2005; Todeva and Knoke, 2005; Hill, 2006). This fact revealed the need of studying the factors that lie beneath the success and failure of alliances (Zaman and Mavondo, 2001).Thesis study in this context is made in order to analyze the concept of strategic alliance in depth, to reveal the factors that affect the success of strategic alliances and to be able to associate these with the operations of the strategic alliances in the lodging industry in Turkey.Keywords: Interorganizational Relationships, International Strategic Alliances, Performance in Strategic Alliances, Factors Affecting Success, Lodging Industry, Turkey.