Worldwide, organisations are establishing joint ventures to overcome market trends and size-specific challenges. Smaller sized organisations lack financial resources to introduce their innovation to the market, while larger sized organisations trouble with renewing their core business models. Consequently, more and more joint ventures are established between dissimilar sized organisations to combine resources and knowledge. However, these asymmetric joint ventures are subject to specific opportunistic behaviour which is promoted by a power imbalance between the partners.

Opportunistic behaviour may harm the performance of a joint venture and may even jeopardise the survivability of an organisation. In an asymmetric joint venture it is likely that the larger sized organisation will accumulate the majority of bargaining power by which the smaller sized organisation is put at risk. Therefore this research is conducted to assess how opportunistic behaviour emerges through a power imbalance. And eventually how this affects the overall performance of an asymmetric joint venture. Next, it is expected that when opportunistic behaviour emerges, that it will decrease cooperative behaviour and thus will affect the trust between the partners.

Data was retrieved by combining the SDC Platinum alliance database with the Orbis financial database to identify asymmetric joint ventures which have been established worldwide in the last ten years. From these asymmetric joint ventures, only the joint ventures operating in the manufacturing division were contacted, because these are characterised by product innovations to stay competitive. By doing several internet searches per asymmetric joint venture, contact information could be retrieved of executives knowledgeable of these joint ventures. A cross-sectional survey design was used to collect data about the asymmetric joint ventures. In total 77 completed surveys were collected.

The results of this research show that the amount of financial resources and expertise brought to the joint venture will determine the bargaining power of each partner. The majority of bargaining power is in most cases accumulated by the larger partner and is based on the financial investments made to the joint venture. The powerful party may use its bargaining power to alter the strategic direction of the joint venture in her favour, as bargaining power was found to be negatively correlated with goal congruence. Next, the relationship between goal congruence and joint venture performance was found to be fully mediated by trust. This suggests that opportunistic behaviour needs time to get recognised by the disadvantaged partner since it is disguised.

Despite the fact that roughly 70% of the joint ventures worldwide were found to be asymmetric and achieve less performance than symmetric alliances, the current literature is barely addressing the characteristics that influence the performance of asymmetric joint ventures. This research, however, addressed some of these characteristics by examining the relationship between power imbalance and opportunistic behaviour in asymmetric joint ventures.
The practical relevance of this study is that the bargaining power of the larger partner may be limited by the smaller partner by significantly contributing in expertise to the joint venture. Next, smaller partners should be aware of different sized absorptive capacities, through which the larger partner may outlearn them and identify private opportunities that may promote opportunistic behaviour. Lastly, this research showed that trust is a critical factor in achieving high performance in asymmetric joint ventures. However, building a relationship in an asymmetric setting might be a challenging task due to the unfamiliarity between the dissimilar sized organisations.