Exploring Organizational Motives and Challenges in Cross-Sector Social Partnerships Project: A Case of Tillväxt Malmö Project

The project is based on cross-sector partnerships to address societal problems (CSSP’s). CSSP’s are increasingly needed to address sustainability around the world. Previous studies on partnerships literature mostly investigated the organizational motives and key success factors. Regarding organizational motives, many studies investigated the motives of the organization to join partnerships in the context of dyadic partnerships such as non-profit and business partnerships. There is a need to investigate further the motives of the organization to join the social partnerships project with more than two sectors participated in the project. Meanwhile, the complexity of partnerships is increasing when more than three-sectors partnerships involved in the project. Some scholars also argued that cross-sector partnerships have a higher failure rate of partnerships rather than within sector partnerships.Therefore, this study aims to explore organizational motives to join and participate in cross-sector social partnerships project on a local level, and organizational challenges during implementation of it. A case study of Tillväxt Malmö project was chosen in this study as the project consists of more than three-sectors partnerships, which are a non-profit organization as the focal organization, and their partners are private sector (companies and investors), university and local governments.This study found there are four themes of organizational motives, which are society, resources, legitimacy, and competency that emerges from empirical finding. Most of the motives that are mentioned by organizations who joined and participate in the Tillväxt Malmô project is to address societal issues, to promote positive change, to bring benefits and help the growth of local business in Malmö city, and to support the development of social incubator in Malmö. This study also discovered four types of challenges which are (1) the different and changing of organizational mission and objectives, (2) the different of language, logic and perspective, (3) the difficulty to make organizational to work together and see each other as equal, and (4) the lack of transparency. Furthermore, the study also found that organizational motive has an important role that determines the sustainability of partnerships, whereas the different organizational motive between the partners to participate in CSSPs project could present as a barrier that strains the relationships between the partners.The paper illustrates the organizational motives and challenges in cross-sector social partnerships project which includes more than three-sectors in the domain to support the local economic development. Theoretically, this contributes to providing comprehensive literature about the motives and challenges in cross-sector social partnerships. In practical, it also gives an insight for project leaders or managers to address the relevant issues that face during implementation of cross-sector social partnerships project