Power Imbalance in Collaboration Relationships

Abstract

Power plays a significant role in many organizational theories such as resource dependency theory and transaction cost economics. It allows the strong companies to win more than others, or more broadly, to coerce others to do what they would not otherwise do. Power can seriously affect the confidence and commitment between parties. This paper aims to analyze the power concept in inter-organizational relationships. We discuss some formal results modeling power and the set of elements and property necessary to understand these concepts. We also proposed a "power generation process" that allows to describe how power is developed in a relationship according to dependency. As far as we were able to browse the scientific literature, these are the first attempts to suggest a robust foundation of the power theory.