Collaborative approaches to public problem solving and service delivery have become nearly standard practice (McGuire and Silvia 2010). Today’s public managers are as likely to work within and lead networks comprised of representatives from different organizations, professions, and sectors as they are to work within and lead their own organizations. Sometimes collaborative endeavors are voluntary and the collaborative leader can choose whom to recruit to be part of the network. The ability to recruit the right collaborative partners is critical (O’Leary and Vij 2012) because it allows the collaborative leader to amass the people and resources that are required to address the issues that bring them together (Silvia forthcoming). This important issue has been increasingly studied (e.g. Berardo and Scholz 2010; Calanni et al. 2015; Feiock, Lee, and Park 2012; Graddy and Chen 2009; Ryu 2014; Silvia forthcoming).
However, what happens when the collaborative leader is not able to choose with whom to collaborate? What happens when the collaborating entities choose whom to send as their representative? This commonly occurs when collaboration is mandated. Because the incorporation of the right partners is a key to success (Graddy and Chen 2009), this issue is of critical importance to public administration scholars and practitioners. Despite its importance, this issue has not yet been studied. Thus, the research question motivating this paper is: who does a manger choose to send to a mandated collaborative and why?
This research question will be examined using conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is a technique that allows for the examination of an individual’s choice process and the trade-offs that he or she makes while making that decision (Rao 2014). The sample for this study will be comprised of 800 managers from governmental, private, and non-profit organizations, and will be balanced with regard to respondent gender. Each respondent will be presented with the descriptions of a mandated collaborative endeavor and of four employees. They will then be asked to identify the employee that they would assign to the collaborative. The employees will be described as having varying levels of different characteristics, including employee performance, criticality, expertise, and collaborative nature. The conceptual foundation of these characteristics will be based upon network theory and the person-organization/person-task fit literatures. The resulting data will be used to determine the effects and joint effects of different levels of the employee characteristics on the respondents’ decision. The contribution this paper makes is twofold. First, it provides practitioners and scholars with a better understanding of how organizations decide to engage in collaborative arrangements by seeing how managers decide who to select to collaborate. This will assist practitioners in being able to strategically position their networks to encourage organizations to assign their best and brightest to the network. Additionally, it will help scholars increase their theoretical understanding of network composition and its implications. Second, this paper demonstrates an application of conjoint analysis, an underused analytic technique in the field of public administration that holds promise for better understanding how people make decisions and confront trade-offs between alternatives.
Furthering network governance theory development: challenges/opportunities, new theoretica
