Terry R. Adler

The Swift Trust Partnership: A Project Management Exercise Investigating the Effects of Trust and Distrust in Outsourcing Relationships

The Swift Trust exercise provides instructors with the opportunity to discuss the issues of managing trust and distrust perceptions in a team-based design. Lewicki, McAllister, and Bies’s (1998) framework is used to allow students to experience the difficulties of deriving a common set of contract requirements based on team dynamics and reputational factors of a potential future trading partner. This interteam exercise provides instructors with a medium-term simulation (from three to four class periods) that can be used to discuss integrating simultaneous trust and distrust perceptions. Discussion of pedagogical issues and implications is provided to assist instructors in conducting this exercise.

An Attempt At A Consentience Regarding Formal Leadership

Given the importance of leadership in organizations, an attempt to integrate the many disparate concepts and constructs related to this topic is long overdue. With that goal in mind, an integrative framework was created that focuses on three distinct levels of abstraction- big leadership, mid-range leadership, and small leadership. Within this tripartite taxonomy, an attempt was made to reconcile some vexing issues that have been frustrating academics and practitioners alike. Big leadership is viewed as transformational in nature, requiring a charismatic visionary being in the right place at the right time. Both mid-range and small leadership, however, are transactional in nature, but small leadership is so to a fault. Our approach to mid-range leadership theory attempts to identify the important dimensions of transactional leadership, differentiate the normative from the situational ones, and specify the conditions under which the situational leadership factors apply. In our framework, small leadership consists of the myriad of quotidian interactions between the leader and subordinates that are easy to overlook but have an important cumulative effect on the social compact between leader and subordinates that is so essential to gaining subordinate compliance. Lastly, whenever appropriate, contingencies are specified at all three levels, and substitutes for leadership identified. While not a mega-theory, our leadership framework is integrative and, thus, useful to managers who lead organizations, teams, and individuals.

Complex systems: boundary‐spanning training techniques

This paper explores the issue of the types of skills required of leaders and followers in new organizational forms. It reviews the concept of virtual teams in organizations. The paper addresses the role of training in facilitating boundary spanning in organisations using case examples.

An evaluation of the social perspective in the development of technical requirements

Uses a qualitative methodology to examine how discourse norms and socialization processes affect the development of technical requirements. Our exploratory investigation of how government personnel develop and review technical requirements indicates that discourse norms and academic technical writing socialization processes affect the technical writing process. Technical writers perceived that requirements in work statements became less precise as more requirements were coordinated in team-based designs. In essence, we found that, in team-based designs, interpretation conflict and technical diffusion were important dimensions when writing and coordinating technical requirements. Our findings suggest that collaborative technical writing is a complex and difficult process in team-based designs where integration and persuasion skills dominate.

An exemplar of open strategy: decision-making within multi-sector collaborations

Purpose – Collaborations and partnerships that span economic sectors heighten the complexity of decision-making processes and introduce challenges for structuring collective action. As hybrid organizations designed for cooperation, multi-sector partnerships involving firms from the private, public, and nonprofit industries are more likely to utilize a platform of open strategy than their single-sector counterparts. Through studying the decision-making process of multi-sector partnerships, the purpose of this paper is to suggest that the formative extra-organizational boundary conditions of these partnerships create fertile ground for a platform of open strategy. Design/methodology/approach – This manuscript presents a thorough analysis of the literature regarding multi-sector partnerships and the construct of open strategy to consider the importance of goal interdependence and strategic openness in the strategic decision-making process. The combination of these research streams results in a theoretical mo...

The Importance of Managing Strategic IT Project Contracts Using a Business Process Approach

Much has been written about managing information technology IT project contracts and their ultimate effect on fulfilling an organizations strategy. The integration of managing IT projects, contracts and firm strategy, however, continues to capture the attention of scholars and practitioners. This paper discusses the integration of these issues while providing a necessary process framework of how project contracts become strategic to firms when repeated transactions, increased risk identification, enhanced trust over time, and improved exploration and learning are present. IT project management has been and continues to be a growth profession, and the use of IT project contracts to outsource work has been increasing in importance as well. The authors have found that IT project management is collaborative when work is administered through information technology contracts that respond to organizational objectives. Because of the variance in how IT contracts are managed, they develop a strategic process model and discuss two lessons learned to better facilitate managing IT contracts. The proposed model and lessons learned provide insight so that the achievement of organizational strategy can be improved through simultaneous IT project and goal alignment.

Collaborating Smartly: The Role of Open Strategy in Absorptive Capacity

Research on open strategy suggests that shared knowledge through collaboration can generate co‐created value. We explore this idea by assessing it as a predictor of absorptive capacity (ACAP) in cross‐sector partnerships in pursuit of social innovation. The findings of our study indicate that aspects of strategic openness, including a shared sense of interdependence toward a mutual goal, are the primary mechanisms that enhance knowledge accretion in cross‐sector partnerships. The data also suggest that formalized organizational mechanisms are more influential for producing ACAP than informal mechanisms.