Cooperation across Disciplines: A Multilevel Perspective on Cooperative Behavior in Governing Interfirm Relations

This article unpacks the concept of cooperation in management. To stimulate future research, we illustrate the different conceptualizations of cooperation in strategic management, organization theory, and behavioral economics, and the unique insights that each discipline offers. Based on this account, we discuss overlaps and differences in how the concept has been used in these fields and across their different levels of theory and analysis. By taking strategic alliances and other interfirm relations as an exemplary illustration, we elaborate a research agenda on how the understanding of cooperation at each level of analysis—firm/alliance, work group/team, individual and interindividual—would benefit from greater integration of knowledge from other levels. Borrowing from the different disciplines, we explicate the social mechanisms—and related research directions—determining cooperation and their outcomes across levels: from macro-to-micro (e.g., explaining how cultural issues, different alliance structures, and organizational designs affect the cooperative behavior of interfirm team members); micro-to-micro (e.g., how individual motivation to cooperate or defect, or how different leadership styles, affect interfirm team members' collaboration); and micro-to-macro (e.g., how self-interested individuals who identify with their firm can be aggregated into collaborative interfirm bureaucracies). The emerging framework contributes to the understanding of the micro foundations of management phenomena by placing cooperative relationships between and among persons at center stage in explaining how organizational outcomes are generated.