How does interorganizational collaboration work? Examining interorganizational collaboration among human services nonprofits

Over the past three decades, interorganizational collaboration among human services nonprofits has dramatically increased to the point where collaborative arrangements among these organizations have become one the hallmarks of the new millennium. However, although the increasing popularity of interorganizational collaboration among human service nonprofits has generated a lot of interest and research from a variety of disciplines and greatly contributed to our knowledge on nonprofit collaborations, there are still too many unanswered questions about how nonprofit collaborative partnerships form and how the conditions and factors of their formation shape the processes sustaining those partnerships and their effectiveness. As such, the main goal of this dissertation is to examine the connections between the antecedents, the processes, and the outcomes of nonprofit partnerships. Informed by collaboration theory, institutional theory, and an evolutionary theory of organizing which suggests that interorganizational relations are formed under particular conditions and that these conditions shape the development or evolution of the relations and their outcomes, this dissertation examined the connections between antecedents (impetus for collaboration and partner selection factors), processes (trust, communication quality, and conflict management effectiveness), and outcomes (quality and effectiveness) of 224 collaborative partnerships among nonprofits involved in the administration of human services in the State of Illinois. The results from the comparison of 17 mandated and 17 voluntary nonprofit partnerships suggest that voluntary partnerships have less conflict and manage conflicts more effectively than mandated partnerships. Moreover, the results from the path analysis of 185 nonprofit partnerships suggest that some partner selection factors such as organizational reputation, prior experience, and homophily are directly related to trust and communicative quality, and indirectly related to the effectiveness of those partnerships. Furthermore, conflict management effectiveness was not directly connected to any of the partner selection factors, but was directly connected to trust and to collaborative effectiveness. Additionally, trust was the best predictor of communication quality, conflict management effectiveness, collaboration quality, and collaborative effectiveness among human services nonprofits. Overall, the results of this investigation suggest that antecedents to nonprofit partnerships are directly connected to the processes sustaining those partnerships, and only indirectly connected to the effectiveness of those partnerships