Understanding Collaboration, Its Antecedents And Perceived Outcomes In Service Partnerships Of Community-based Organizations

The purpose of this study is to assess the motivations of community-based organizations (CBOs) staff to participate in service partnerships and their influence on collaboration practices and perceived outcomes of collaborative efforts. This study uses structural equation modeling to assess the relationships between exogenous variables (motivational factors) and endogenous variables (inter-organizational collaboration and perceived outcomes). This study also uses qualitative methods to address perceptions on collaboration not captured by the survey instrument. A total of 538 service partnership staff (supervisors and front liners) received the survey\u27s link or a copy of the survey to participate. Out of the 538, 217 completed the survey which represents a 40% response rate. Due to missing responses and multiple outliers, 201 observations were used for analysis. Based on the findings of this study, it was concluded that the development of service partnerships are mostly affected by environmental factors related to solving social problems which accounts for 37% of variance in inter-organizational collaboration. Empirical evidence from this study has shown that CBOs staff have the tendency to work for the purpose of meeting their social missions. Furthermore, inter-organizational collaboration accounts for 76% of variance in perceived outcomes. When a three factor collaboration model was created, it was further noticed that cognitive and resource reciprocity statistically significant influence perceived outcomes where differences in the perceptions of front liners and supervisors were also found. These findings highlight important aspects to understand the collaboration dynamics of service partnerships and also points out the different iii views of community based organization staff regarding the motivation to collaborate and the impact of collaboration practices in perceived collaboration outcomes. However, it is also important to note that findings on the comparison between front liners and supervisors are exploratory in nature as there could be other external factors that could affect the impact in interorganizational collaboration and collaboration outcomes. Regarding the focus groups, three themes emerged with respect to the motivations for participating in service partnerships. Agents for social change, building relationships and needs of resources are recurrent themes that explained the desires to collaborate. On collaboration practices, two main general themes emerged which are interdependence and partnership values. Lastly, impacting the community, sustainability issues and expanding services were the main themes found when perception of service partnership outcomes was addressed. Findings of this study suggest further exploration on multi-dimensional models of collaboration, investigate differences in staff perceptions, and continue exploring the influence of social threat responsiveness in inter-organizational collaboration and perceived partnerships outcomes