Notice of RetractionCooperation and Competition of Interfirm Network Organizations: The Function of Synergies

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Synergy is a kind of governance mechanism to coordinate bilateral or multilateral relations. It has significant influence on co-opetition structure and behaviors between firms and the performance of interfirm network organizations that they lead to. Breaking through the traditional result-oriented research and taking behavior-oriented perspective, this work tries to develop a systematic understanding of synergy and interfirm network organizations. Drawing on ethnographic field study conducted at 27 organizations, we analyze the characters and types of synergy behaviors of interfirm network organizations based on grounded theory and discuss the three paths through which synergy behavior may influence the behavioral logic of network organizations. The findings suggest that synergy is a kind of exchange logic that promotes economies of task fulfillment efficiency, resources acquisition and allocation, and risk sharing through high-quality information transfer, interactive organization learning and trust. Grounded on that, this work analyzes the functional mechanism of the three paths in details.