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Chris Huxham is Head of the Department of Management at the University of Strathclyde's Graduate Business School, (Glasgow, Scotland) and is a renowned expert on collaboration and collaboration advantage. Huxham has been researching inter-organizational collaboration for over 18 years and has considerable experience of a variety of partnerships in the public and community sectors, with particular focus on economic and social development.
Advantage in Collaborative Working
Partnership working is not easy to initiate and sustain, but it has become an important method of achieving the objectives of organizations in a wide range of unstable and fast-changing environments.
According to Huxham, advantage flows from collaboration: [1]
‘ ... when something unusually creative is produced – perhaps an objective is met – that no organization could have produced on its own and when each organization, through the collaboration, is able to achieve its own objectives better than it could alone. In some cases, it should also be possible to achieve some higher-level objectives for society as a whole rather than just for the participating organizations.’
Huxham sees partnership working as a valuable, and perhaps the only viable approach to resolving major economic and social problems, as well as a valid and proved method of addressing inter-organizational community issues and challenges. She distinguishes between collaboration as a worthwhile way of seeking to fulfill individual and multi-organization objectives (e.g. in joint funding of a project) and collaborative advantage, defined as a higher-level and ambitious form of partnership working.
Collaborative advantage looks to maximize the return from the high investment of resources required to make collaboration work effectively. It is about creating synergy within partnerships where there is a real desire to share visions and achieve empowerment and for all parties to achieve benefits from the collaboration.
Dimensions of Rationale for Partnerships
In illustrating the variety of purposes that collaboration can serve, Huxham draws on a ‘framework of dimensions’ to distinguish the various reasons for the formation of partnerships. [2] She postulates a number of areas subdivided into different dimensions of collaboration:
Areas
Dimensions
Empowerment and participation
• ideological ---- instrumental
• participation ---- organizations working together
Power relationships
• changing power relationships ---- effecting task-based change
• empower the weak ---- increase own power
Addressing conflict
• resolving conflict ---- achieving a shared vision
• coalition forming ---- all-party collaboration
Ambition
• exchange of information ---- joint agreements
• information exchange ---- enhancing another's capacity
However, she acknowledges that there is a great deal of overlap and linkages between the dimensions so they cannot be used as anything other than a broad attempt to specify the parameters of a collaboration.
CDifficulties in Collaboration
Working with others is never an easy option. It is difficult enough at the individual level but when organizations are involved the difficulties are multiplied many times over. Huxham uses the symptom ‘collaborative inertia’ to describe the condition where partnerships appear to be floundering and making much slower progress than might have been expected. She attributes this to a failure to address sufficiently early in the process, the following:
- differences in aims among the organizations, some of which may be vague, fluid or simply conflicting
- difficulties in communication with different professional or sectoral groups using different ‘language’ and terminology
- different cultures and procedures with a variety of values, priorities and ways of working
- perceived power imbalance with small organizations feeling intimidated by larger organizations
- tensions between autonomy and accountability of individuals representing organizations in the partnership
- the lack of an authority structure where there are no formal hierarchies in the partnership
- time demands in partnership working are substantial, particularly in managing the process
Conclusion
From her extensive research, Huxham concludes that while collaboration is undoubtedly difficult, there are processes which can aid effective practice, and so collaborative working should be considered as a viable means of achieving organizational objectives in any sector.
For more information, see Managing to Collaborate: The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage by Chris Huxham and Siv Vangen (2005).
References[1] Chris Huxham, ‘Pursuing Collaborative Advantage’, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 44(6): pp 599-611, 1993.
[2] Chris Huxham, Creating Collaborative Advantage (Sage Publications Ltd, 1996).
