A Meeting of Minds

Working collaboratively with other organisations is not a new phenomenon. At present however, charities are under pressure to collaborate more to cope with an uncertain political landscape, reductions in funding and the need to work more efficiently. But just how effective is collaboration in enabling the sector to do more with fewer resources? In this article, I will highlight findings from a programme of research on the management of inter-organizational collaboration that has been ongoing for two decades, and which draws on the experiences of individuals who are working collaboratively. Over the years, the insight gained has accumulated into theory called "collaborative advantage"

Leadership in the shaping and implementation of collaboration agendas: how things happen in a (not quite) joined-up world

This article contributes to the theory if collaboration in social settings and is based on data collected during action research interventions in a number of public and community interorganizational collaborations. We conceptualize leadership in collaborations as stemming from three leadership media - structures, processes, and participants - and argue that none of these is wholly within the control of the members of a collaboration. Leadership activities that participants undertake in order to move a collaborative agenda forward are described

Understanding Leadership in Public Collaborative Context

The paper aims to contribute to theory on collaboration through problematizing and exploring the complexity that characterizes leadership in collaborative contexts and to provide some generative conceptualizations to inform future empirical and conceptual development. It draws on a substantial review of leadership theory relevant to the context of public sector collaboration and provides examples from empirical research on collaboration over the last two decades in the UK and US respectively. It does so by identifying and developing key characteristics of the context, the nature of leadership in relation to context, and leadership agency pertaining to actors who actually make a difference in the process and outcomes of collaboration

Researching Leadership for Collaborative Advantage

The paper explores leadership in inter-organizational collaborative contexts where the aim is to achieve synergistic gains known as Collaborative Advantage (Huxham and Vangen, 2005). It reviews relevant literature on leadership including the theory of collaborative advantage and extant research on constructionist relational and collective leadership. It reports on empirical research undertaken in the context of a UK public sector children’s services; a context characterized by turbulence, austerity and now Brexit. It develops four ‘relational leadership dimensions’ relevant to collaborative context. These dimensions arise in the interface between: sectoral contexts; partner organizations and the collaboration; the collaboration and service users, and the individual leader and the collaboration. It concludes with some thoughts on methodological challenges for empirical research in collaborative contexts

The Tangled Web: Unraveling the Principle of Common Goals in Collaborations

This article addresses a “goals paradox” that suggests that both congruence and diversity in organizations’ goals influence success in collaboration. Using extensive empirical data, we develop a framework that portrays goals as an entangled, dynamic, and ambiguously hierarchical web of variously perceived, higher- and lower-level goals that can be characterized across six dimensions: level, origin, authenticity, relevance, content, and overtness. We then explore the paradox in terms of the framework and so propose a much elaborated theoretical understanding of it. This provides theoretical and practical understanding relevant to management and governance in and of collaboration

Governing cross-sector, inter-organizational collaborations

This article addresses the governance of cross-sector, inter-organizational collaboration in the context of public administration and management. It conceptualizes the governance of collaborations in terms of structures and processes that enable actors to direct, coordinate and allocate resources for the collaboration as a whole and to account for its activities. It argues that the need to pay attention to considerations of ‘collaborative governance’ and ‘governing collaboration’ in cross-sector collaborations gives rise to a number of challenges and tensions that need to be addressed if the governance form is to be sustained and the collaboration is to yield advantage