A Systematic and Bibliometric Review on the Role of Strategic Alliances in Achieving Sustainable Competitive Advantage in the Airline Industry: From Resource Dependence Theory Perspective

Airlines depend on various resources to provide air transportation service to passengers in a competitive, dynamic, and turbulent environment. According to Resource Dependency Theory (RDT), strategic alliances are one of the political actions and behaviors that organizations operating in intense competitive environments resort to gain access to necessary resources and avoid resource uncertainty. In line with, airlines use strategic alliances such as code share alliances and global airline alliances to access to the resources they need more easily for their sustainability. We aim to argue how strategic alliances provide sustainable competitive advantage to airlines from resource dependence theory perspective in this systematic and bibliometric review. The study reviewed the top 30 most cited studies out of 156 studies from the WoS database. In addition, all the studies in the dataset were subjected to citation network and co-word analysis, supporting the findings of the review of the most cited studies. The findings confirm that strategic alliances are seen as a network and that airlines achieve a sustainable competitive advantage through access to network resources. The study contributes to the literature by determining the conditions to be considered in the success of strategic alliances. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.