The Group Dynamics of Interorganizational Collaboration

This article addresses the relational dynamics of interorganizational relationships where multiple legally independent organizations work on a joint goal, for example in public–private partnerships, alliances, or joint ventures. It focuses on the dynamics of groups that consist of members representing different organizations and thus different interests, who come together to work on the multiparty task. The relational dynamics are understood from a so-called systems-psychodynamic perspective, which aims to understand the emotional life of social systems in context. The article first will depict the relational challenges of working across organizational boundaries. It then will briefly sketch how social psychology (the domain par excellence for studying intergroup relations and group dynamics) helps fathom the relational challenges and where its insights are incomplete. Then, a systems-psychodynamic perspective is introduced. The article proceeds with describing an action research approach that is sensitive to the emotional underpinnings of interorganizational relationships, by providing two illustrations: one involving a real-life infrastructural project, the other concerning a complex behavioral simulation of interorganizational dynamics. The article ends with some reflections on the use of a systems-psychodynamic perspective in understanding and working with multiparty dynamics.

An exploratory analysis of network characteristics and quality of interactions among public health collaboratives

While the benefits of collaboration have become widely accepted and the practice of collaboration is growing within the public health system, a paucity of research exists that examines factors and mechanisms related to effective collaboration between public health and their partner organizations. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap by exploring the structural and organizational characteristics of public health collaboratives. Design and Methods. Using both social network analysis and traditional statistical methods, we conduct an exploratory secondary data analysis of 11 public health collaboratives chosen from across the United States. All collaboratives are part of the PARTNER (www.partnertool.net) database. We analyze data to identify relational patterns by exploring the structure (the way that organizations connect and exchange relationships), in relation to perceptions of value and trust, explanations for varying reports of success, and factors related to outcomes. We describe the characteristics of the collaboratives, types of resource contributions, outcomes of the collaboratives, perceptions of success, and reasons for success. We found high variation and significant differences within and between these collaboratives including perceptions of success. There were significant relationships among various factors such as resource contributions, reasons cited for success, and trust and value perceived by organizations. We find that although the unique structure of each collaborative makes it challenging to identify a specific set of factors to determine when a collaborative will be successful, the organizational characteristics and interorganizational dynamics do appear to impact outcomes. We recommend a quality improvement process that suggests matching assessment to goals and developing action steps for performance improvement.

Market of Resources

The implementation of an organizational model characterized by very high interorganizational dynamics, such as the virtual enterprise (VE) model, presents several requirements in order to keep the VE partnership aligned with the market, that is, with business (Cunha & Putnik, 2005a, 2005c, 2006b). Such requirements include (1) the reduction of reconfiguration costs and effort and (2) the capability to preserve the firms’ private knowledge on products or processes (Cunha & Putnik, 2006c). These must be assured by a specific environment, or, in other words, by organizational infrastructures such as a meta-organizational structure for VE design (or integration) and operation, such as the market of resources—an environment developed by the authors to cope with the highlighted requirements, assuring better performance than the traditional environments such as Internet search engines or electronic marketplaces (Cunha & Putnik, 2005c; Cunha, Putnik, Gunasekaran, & Ávila, 2005a). However, VE formation, integration, and operation rely on the existence of an adequate platform of information and communication technologies (Cunha & Putnik, 2003; Cunha, Putnik, & Silva, 2005b). The environment for creation, integration, operation, reconfiguration, and dissolution can be implemented under the format of a market of resources, an entity conceived to cover the whole VE life cycle (Cunha, Putnik, & Ávila, 2004). The market of resources, its characteristics, operation, and functionalities, is specifically addressed in a different article in this encyclopedia.