Collaboration Issues in Cross-Corporate Initiatives

Collaboration Issues in Cross-Corporate Initiatives

🔥NEW When aiming for strategic synergy or other forms of cross-group collaboration, one should not only think carefully about logistics and processes, incentives and outcomes, but also about how the groups that are being asked to work together will experience the requests made on them.
In particular, one is wise to pay attention and identify threats to the involved groups' security feelings in order to minimize them and prevent or discourage any defensive behaviors and/or resistance to change.
To do this, Lisa Kwan recommends to ask: How might the collaboration initiative be considered a threat to:

• GROUP IDENTITY (what a group understands itself to be),
• GROUP LEGITIMACY (being perceived as fitting and valuable bu others), and
• GROUP CONTROL (the ability to work autonomously)

of the main groups involved?
Source: Lisa B. Kwan, "The Collaboration Blind Spot", HBR Mar-Apr 2019, pp. 66-73.