The Influence of Affect on Firm’s Motivation to Collaborate in Developing a New Technology

This thesis aimed at developing a comprehensive discussion that explains how firm’s motivation to collaborate in developing a new technology starts and evolves and what kind of outcomes it produces on interorganizational networks. This was done by analysing perceptions of senior managers who shape the early stages of firm decision-making. Previous research has suggested that affect is important in the way managers perceive collaboration options. The specific objective of this research was to understand and describe how exactly affect influences managers’ sensemaking and perceptions and how that ultimately leads to shaping firm tendencies to collaborate or not to collaborate in developing a new technology. I used qualitative research design consisting of interviews with open-ended questions to develop the grounded theory. In data analysis, I used the Gioia method to establish scholarly rigor where I combined inductive reasoning to generate codes purely from the data with abductive reasoning to generate theory-driven themes and aggregate dimensions. I then generated a model that articulates the grounded theory in a narrative dynamic way. The findings suggest that the influence of affect happens over two stages: direct influence and downstream consequences. In the stage of direct influence, manager’s affective state resulting from experiencing an event of affective significance directly impacts his perception of three factors: how trustworthy the potential partner is, how pleasant, desirable and technologically feasible the new technology is, and how much control he believes his firm will be able to exert during the collaboration to protect its interests. Some of these perceptions are determined primarily by manager’s rational evaluation while others are determined primarily by manager’s emotional evaluation. In the stage of downstream consequences, the aforementioned three factors determine the level of risk of collaboration as perceived by the manager. Manager’s affective state can also influence the way he perceives the benefits (reward) of collaboration. Manager’s perception of risk and reward contributes in steering firm’s decision to a certain direction and drives its motivation to collaborate, but not necessarily dictates its final decision. The findings have implications to literature in several areas including affect, interorganizational collaborations and networks, trust, control and risk as well as implications to managerial practices in building partnerships in B2B marketplace platform businesses