ABSTRACT
The success factors and challenges of interorganizational collaboration have been widely studied from different disciplinary perspectives. However, the role of design in making such collaborations resilient has received little attention, although deliberately designing for resilience is likely to be vital to the success of any interorganizational collaboration. This study explores the resilience of interorganizational collaboration by means of a comparative case study of Dutch maternity care providers, which have been facing major challenges due to financial cutbacks, government-enforced collaborative structures, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings make two contributions to the literature. First, we further develop the construct of interorganizational resilience. Second, we shed light on how well-designed distributed decision-making enhances resilience, thereby making a first attempt at meeting the challenge of designing for interorganizational resilience.
ABSTRACT
This study tests organizational trust as the psychosocial mechanism that explains how healthy organizational practices and team resources predict multilevel performance in organizations and teams, respectively. In our methodology, we collect data in a sample of 890 employees from 177 teams and their immediate supervisors from 31 Spanish companies. Our results from the multilevel analysis show two independent processes predicting organizational performance (return on assets, ROA) and performance ratings by immediate supervisors, operating at the organizational and team levels, respectively. We have found evidence for a theoretical and functional quasi-isomorphism. First, based on social exchange theory, we found evidence for our prediction that when organizations implement healthy practices and teams provide resources, employees trust their top managers (vertical trust) and coworkers (horizontal trust) and try to reciprocate these benefits by improving their performance. Second, (relationships among) constructs are similar at different levels of analysis, which may inform HRM officers and managers about which type of practices and resources can help to enhance trust and improve performance in organizations. The present study contributes to the scarce research on the role of trust at collective (i.e., organizational and team) levels as a psychological mechanism that explains how organizational practices and team resources are linked to organizational performance.