When Autonomy Collides With Control: Leveraging Strategic Alignment by Boundary‐Spanning for Business Model Innovation in Corporate Ventures

ABSTRACT Corporate ventures (CV) must reconcile entrepreneurial discretion with parent‐firm accountability, yet how venture actors experience this contradiction and how it relates to business model innovation (BMI) performance remain unclear. Drawing on paradox theory, we examined whether perceived autonomy–control tension is associated with BMI performance through strategic alignment and whether boundary‐spanning leadership conditions its associations with strategic alignment and BMI performance. We tested a moderated mediation model using two‐wave survey data from 196 South Korean CV leaders and partial least squares structural equation modeling. Perceived autonomy–control tension was negatively associated with BMI performance and exhibited a negative indirect association through strategic alignment at mean boundary‐spanning leadership. Boundary‐spanning leadership attenuated the negative associations with strategic alignment and BMI performance, and the indirect association was no longer statistically distinguishable from zero at high leadership. Supplementary estimates showed negative associations of boundary‐spanning leadership with both outcomes under low tension and positive associations under high tension. The study shifts attention from formal governance architecture to actor‐experienced governance strain, positions strategic alignment as a relational pathway to BMI performance and identifies governance strain as a boundary condition on the relevance of boundary‐spanning leadership. It extends boundary‐spanning leadership to authority‐sensitive parent–venture interfaces and theorizes internal political translation as a possible process. The findings suggest diagnosing recurring governance strain, sustaining strategic compatibility, and using perceived strain to guide when boundary‐spanning capability is mobilized.