Interculturaliy and sustainability of inter-company partnerships : the case of international strategic alliances

While some researchers perceive interculturality as a brake on the sustainability of international strategic alliances, others see it however as a longevity factor of these relationships. This divergence, which is found also among many leaders, affects the subject of intercultural management. It leads to seek to minimize cultural differences or to integrate cultural systems of partner companies. These two approaches generating various managerial processes, our work aims to analyze their complementarity. In this perspective, we conducted sixteen semi-structured interviews with french and tunisian managers operating in eight stable franco-tunisian asymmetric alliances. Our results show that bimodal intercultural management, based on the exploitation of the benefits of cultural diversity and inhibition of its disadvantages, is a source of sustainability of cooperation.