Teaming in the public sector. Investigating the responses of cross-boundary collaborations to the paradoxes of teaming.

Abstract

The wicked problems with which the public sector is confronted ask for cross-boundary collaborations to come up with innovative solutions for tackling them. Therefore, these collaborations have to go through a process of bringing together skills and ideas from disparate areas to produce something new, which is referred to as ‘teaming’. Interestingly, some collaborations succeed, while others fail to do so. Recent literature suggested that this depends on how cross-boundary collaborations balance between the seemingly opposite sides of the three so-called teaming paradoxes: playful chaos and focused discipline, deep experts and broad thinkers, and high standards and high failure tolerance. This study therefore investigated what variation in responses to the teaming paradoxes can be recognized between collaborations, and how this variation can be explained. In doing so, a comparative case study was conducted on six cross-boundary crime-fighting collaborations involved in a field lab setting. Three different responses to the teaming paradoxes – no serious, unbalanced, and balanced responses – were found. These responses seemed to arise of whether or not a conflict between the collaborators was going on and whether or not a common ground was created to start from. Furthermore, the empirical research provided some first indications that responses of cross-boundary collaborations can change over time, which presents an interesting new avenue for follow-up longitudinal comparative case study research.