RDT was formally developed in the 1970s by Pfeffer & Salancik in The External Control of Organizations. Resource dependence theory assumes that organizations are externally constrained by the environment for resources. RDT defines a resource as anything that an actor perceives as valuable, whereas whereas dependence is a state in which one actor relies on the actions of another for achieving particular outcomes (Emerson, 1962). The first assumption of RDT is that the survival of an organization includes the ability to obtain resources from the environment (Pfeffer, 1982). Organizations also need to obtain resources to satisfy the demand of customers for their products and services. Throughout the years, the organization will be selected out by the environment if it losed access to resources. Therefore, organizational survival depends on the ability of the organization to acquire and maintain resources. The second assumption is that the organization that controls the fl ow of resources, could infl uence other organizations. As third assumption, in order to be able to sustain themselves within the environment, organizations must have the ability to acquire information from the environment, know how to react to the environment based on this acquired information, and have the ability to develop future responses based on past experiences (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). The final assumption is that organizations always seek predictability and certainty regarding the resources that they require (Oliver, 1991). They need to have strategies to acquire, maintain, and sustain their survival and prosperity.