COLLABORATION THE NECESSARY EVIL AT THE WORK PLACE
School of Management

Leadership and Organizational Behavior

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to showcase the necessity of collaboration at the work place. The nature of collaboration needed among different components of the work place, leading to high job satisfactions and increased productivity. I will also go into details on the other benefits that can be realized when these work units collaborate among each other. The company I will specifically be dealing with in this research is Boeing and how collaboration has worked into its ultimate success throughout the years.

The Organization Organization: Boeing
Location: Seattle Washington; headquarters in Chicago with presence in several countries around the world.
Economic sector: Aerospace Industry.
Services Offered: Manufacturing of commercial jetliners, Design, assemble and support defense systems, Satellites and launch vehicles among other services.
Number of employees: over 170,000 employees in the United States alone.
Website: http://www.boeing.com

Background
Boeing is a large company of more than 170,000 fulltime and part-time contingent employees. The company is located in Seattle Washington but its headquarters are in Chicago with other locations in the United States and a plethora of others all over the world. With such a large base of employees, the company’s strategy has to be well planned and coordinated to ensure delivery of customer’s products (Boeing.com).
Boeing was established in 1916 in the Puget Sound region of Washington State and became a leading producer of military and commercial aircraft. The company is focused on global strategies, financial goals and performance, leadership development, ethics and compliance. Boeing offers a family of airplanes and a broad portfolio of aviation services for passenger and cargo carriers worldwide. The company’s airlines represent three quarters of the world’s fleet with almost 12,000 jetliners in service. Approximately 70% of Boeing’s commercial airplane sales go to customers outside the United States (Boeing.com).
Problem Statement
Different functional units were formed in a bid to hasten the work at Boeing. However, with the formation of these units, problems of collaboration became evident. The organizational problem Boeing is trying to break away from is the traditional culture of keeping engineers and office workers separated from the mechanics and manufacturing employees who build the planes. My role in this organization as a human resources consultant is to find plausible ways of creating an environment whereby all the employees are able to collaborate with each other thus leading to an increase in productivity, efficiency and also increase in job satisfaction. By getting these employees to work more closely together, I believe that job satisfaction will skyrocket and create a thriving environment where better products are built. Therefore how can job satisfaction, increased productivity, efficiency and effectiveness be attained through collaboration?
Collaboration represents a specific type of interorganizational relationship. Minimally, collaboration is understood to involve: (1) cooperation, coordination, and exchange of resources (e.g., people, funding, information, ideas), and (2) mutual respect for individual goals and/or joint goals (Lewis, Isbell & Koschmann, 2010).Collaboration is emerging as a distinct focus of scholarly research. A wide range of theoretical perspectives results in an equally wide variety of definitions and understandings of the meaning of collaboration (Thomson, Perry & Miller, 2007). They further define collaboration as a process in which autonomous or semi-autonomous actors interact through formal and informal negotiations, jointly creating rules and structures governing their relationships and ways to act or decide on the issues that brought them together; it is a process involving shared norms and mutually beneficial interactions (Thomson, Perry & Miller, 2007).
During the process of forming the collaborative relationship, the primary task has to be the negotiation of habits of mind. This process entails the examination of prior assumptions and leaving behind some of them, thus ensuring that the relationship exists (Swartz & Triscari, 2011). Usually change typically involves actors from different levels and functions, pursuing personal as well as organizational goals (Boddy, Macbeth, Wagner, 2000).Collaborative partnerships have been widely proposed as a means to: (a) increase cost effectiveness of social service delivery, (b) enhance the capacity of partnering agencies, and (c) increase the comprehensive nature of social services (Takahashi& Smutny, 2002).Blau and Rabrenovic (1991) argues that these linkages “are used to integrate programs with a community, coordinate client services, obtain resources, and deal with government agencies” (p.328) (Lewis, Isbell & Koschmann, 2010). While program participants have to identify the benefits of collaboration as communication, sharing of resources, consensus building in the practical aspect of collaborating (Hord, 1986). Collaboration can be an organization’s source of competitive advantage because it does not occur automatically-far from it. Indeed, several barriers impede collaboration within complex multiunit organizations. And in order to overcome those barriers, companies will have to develop distinct organizing capabilities that cannot be easily imitated (Hansen & Nohria, 2004). According to Boddy et al, 2000, in the continuing search for improved performance, one route which managers have to consider is to work more collaboratively with other units within the organization. This is evident because they will be able to secure worthwhile gains from such a strategy if they also initiate supporting changes within the other respective units (Boddy, Macbeth, Wagner, 2000). This might not be the case though since in environments with low utilization, low variability, and a significant lack of balance are unlikely to offer substantial opportunity for improvement through workforce agility unless collaborative efficiency is high (Van Oyen, Gel & Hopp, 2001).
There is also the issue of relationship tension concerns as the attention and focus of collaborations contemplate and balance external demands and internal dynamics of the collaboration. This is likely to occur because collaborative process almost always requires accommodating multiple voices (Lewis, Isbell & Koschmann, 2010) and also because traditional coordination mechanisms such as hierarchy, standardization, and routinization are less feasible in situations where actors are autonomous or semiautonomous (Thomson, Perry & Miller, 2007). Within the structural tensions, participants tend to frequently struggle with issues of formality and flexibility (Lewis, Isbell & Koschmann, 2010). They also acknowledge that practices related to participation, membership, accountability, and decision-making among others are important and many times problematic for collaborations within organizational units.
Coordination provisions should be expected to increase goodwill-based trust in the context of disputes. By creating channels through which differences in perspective will be resolved, coordination provisions will help mitigate misunderstandings of the kind that raise questions about the intent of the other party and thus minimizing damage to the attributions of goodwill during a conflict (Malhotra & Lumineau, 2011).The organization’s ability to transfer knowledge from one unit to another has been found to contribute to the organizational performance but the effectiveness varies considerably among organizations (Sveiby and Simons, 2002). However, they have further acknowledged that the trouble is that knowledge is not a discrete object and that the most valuable knowledge – knowledge - is embedded in people and therefore difficult to transfer outside the immediate context that it becomes a major competitive advantage (Sveiby and Simons, 2002). According to Hardy et al., (2003), collaborating organizations are an important source of knowledge creation. Moreover, knowledge is not simply a resource that can be transferred from organization to organization; rather, new knowledge grows out of the sorts of ongoing social interaction that occurs in ongoing collaborations (Hardy, Phillips & Lawrence, 2003).
One important effect of collaboration lies in its potential to build organizational capacities through the transfer or pooling of resources (Hardy, Phillips & Lawrence, 2003). They further assert that the primary rationale for collaboration is the acquisition of resources through the direct transfer of assets, the sharing of key equipment, intellectual property, or personnel, and the transfer of organizational knowledge (Hardy, Phillips & Lawrence, 2003). In the 1990s, when it built the 777, Boeing conducted all design work internally. But with the new Dreamliner, Boeing’s Global Collaboration Environment has to include team rooms set up with videoconferencing and presentation-sharing software, that lets engineers in a single location gather and access a second (or third, if needed) group assembled elsewhere ( Henrie,2007). This is why companies that excel in using partnerships to innovate are known for doing many things well. For instance they tend to figure out how collaboration can improve the top line as well as the bottom line, and they organize themselves accordingly so as to work effectively with partners (McCormack & Forbath, 2008).
In huge undertakings such as what Boeing is doing with the Dreamliner, it is considered to be high-level collaboration: two or more companies working together as if they are the same company. Most other day-to-day work at Boeing surrounding production of the new aircraft, in departments such as marketing, IT and finance, is considered low-level collaboration according to (Henrie, 2007). There has to exist some mutual understanding between the two or more organizations taking part in collaboration. Mutuality has to have its roots in interdependence. Organizations that collaborate must experience mutually beneficial interdependencies based either on differing interests or on shared interests (Thomson, Perry & Miller, 2007). This is what Boeing has to rely on during the development of the 787 Dreamliner. This incredibly complex project including 50-plus partners from more than 130 locations that have worked together for more than four years says (McCormack & Forbath, 2008) According to McCormack and Forbath (2008), Boeing’s source of competitive advantage is shifting. The company’s success has to be increasingly tied to its ability to orchestrate and integrate the efforts of hundreds of global partners. This will clearly show that Boeing learnt on how to collaborate well with others to ensure efficiency. Thus the interaction between people and context will continue as the collaboration evolves. As behaviors become habitual they will be institutionalized and embedded in ways that may or may not support the partnering strategy (Boddy, Macbeth, Wagner, 2000).
Though collaboration will sometimes be viewed as a meaningless concept by some practitioners who will find the process hopelessly frustrating, it is nevertheless a persistent one as (Thomson, Perry & Miller, 2007) says. The approach to collaboration will have to fall within a collective action view of organizations that focuses on networks of symbiotically interdependent yet semiautonomous organizations that interact to construct or modify their collective environment, working rules, and options (Thomson, Perry & Miller, 2007).Therefore collaborations that are both involved and embedded will more likely be associated with knowledge creation effects; those that will be involved will more likely be associated with strategic effects ;those that will be embedded will more likely be associated with political effects (Hardy, Phillips & Lawrence, 2003). According to Hardy et al., 2003, being highly involved can lead to strategic effects, but being simultaneously highly embedded can lead to knowledge creation effects. As a Human resources consultant, I do believe that collaborative partnerships are a complex interactive process that cannot be defined or created according to a recipe. However, collaborative partnerships are emergent processes of self-organizing, drawing on each other’s inherent capacity to create patterns and the emerging capability of the partnership to do the same (Swartz & Triscari, 2011).
The teams from different cultures will tend to have different strengths and working methods, hence these must be matched to their assigned tasks (McCormack & Forbath, 2008). As Hardy et al. (2003) have pointed out that from the strategy perspective, successful collaborations will have to have clear goals, partner selection criteria, performance monitoring and termination arrangements. However, for the teams to work seamlessly, it’s important to create an infrastructure – a set of tools and standards for sharing data because failure to do so might put a project at risk (McCormack & Forbath, 2008). To deal effectively with tensions, practitioners will have to choose to ignore or avoid tensions once they have identified them and their causes. Another strategy for dealing with apparent tensions seems to be living with them and accepting them as part and parcel of doing collaborative work (Lewis, Isbell & Koschmann, 2010).
The move from competition to collaboration, at least in strategic management thinking, and consequently in the literature dealing with strategic information systems, is only an emerging phenomenon. However, the promise of cooperation, if not nurtured, can easily degenerate into conflict once again (Van Dissel & Kumar, 1996). The program participants might cite impediments as lack of time and financial support and the overburdening of agencies from planning, implementing, and evaluating the collaboration. Collaboration appears to have something for everybody, but it will be difficult to achieve (Hord, 1986). Interunit collaboration is not only difficult to achieve but also poorly understood. However, a framework that links managerial action, barriers to interunit collaboration, and value creation in organizations can help managers “unpack” the concept (Hansen & Nohria, 2004).
By researching on this topic, I have come into a realization on why there is always an emphasize on collaboration or teamwork at my work place especially. Before the change of leadership on my team, we never had any teams to write home about. Every employee had his/her own work place to be concerned about throughout the shift period. Things took a new turn at the change of management. Most of my fellow employees expressed their displeasure with the new way of doing things. But reflecting back now close to four years with the help of this course, I have realized the importance of what the new management instituted. The teamwork spirit is at the highest levels than ever before. That assurance one has that once you step out of your work place someone will step in an take care of things while you are gone gives a satisfaction that we are fully engaged and working together as a team always.

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REFERENCES

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Henrie, K. S. (2007). Collaboration in a flat world. Cioinsight Technology, pp.77-81. Retrieved from http://www.cioinsight.com
Hord, S. M. (1986). A synthesis of research on organizational collaboration. Educational Leadership, 43(5), pp. 5-22. http://www.boeing.com Lewis, L., Isbell, M. G., & Koschmann, M. (2010). Collaborative tensions: practitioners' experiences of interorganizational relationships. Communication Monographs, 77(4), 460-479.
Malhotra, D., & Lumineau, F. (2011). Trust& collaboration in the aftermath of conflict: the effects of contract structure. Academy of Management Journal, 54(5), 981-998.
McCormack, A., & Forbath, T. (2008). Learning the fine art of global collaboration. Harvard Business Review.
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