ABSTRACT
Conveners, as the main organizers of complex inter-organizational collaborations (IOCs), experience tensions as they make decisions based on collaborators’ competing interests and ideas. This paper theorizes conveners’ tension management as their proactive efforts to shape the IOC processes – as opposed to reactive responses to emergent tensions – and examines how they are related to IOCs’ collaborative capacity. A comparative case analysis of two IOCs in regional planning reveals that conveners’ organizing practices that actively promoted tensions contributed to creating a more dynamic and tension-resistant collaborative environment, compared to those of conveners who tried to prevent tensions. Using tensile structure as a metaphor, the author theorizes about when and how proactively promoting tensions can enhance collaborative capacity.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Paul Leonardi for his invaluable guidance on previous versions of this manuscript, and the editor Tamara Afifi and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions that shaped the development of this article. The author also acknowledges Linda Putnam and Karen Myers for their thoughtful feedback. This paper received the Gerardine DeSanctis Award from the Organizational Communication and Information Systems (OCIS) Division at the 2018 Academy of Management annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
DaJung Woo is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Notes
1 As the term has been defined inconsistently across the literatures, I follow traditional uses of the term “capacity” and refer to the ability for an IOC to generate diverse ideas or resources toward achieving its collaborative goal.
2 This member check process involved conveners from Region A only. The MPO in Region B was going through major restructuring, and the lead convener who was the key informant for this study had left the organization.