The SONIC Speaker Series presents

Esther Sackett

Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Expertise Awareness in Multi-Organizational Collaboration: The Role of Goal Awareness

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Esther Sackett of the Northwestern University. Dr. Sackett will speak on Thursday, December 7th, 2017 at 2 PM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-483. Please contact Dr. Michael Schultz with any questions.

 Abstract:

Multistakeholder alliances typically have dual purposes that are often in tension – 1) pooling knowledge and resources toward a collaborative goal, and 2) engaging in knowledge transfer by leveraging knowledge and resources for each individual organization’s benefit. However, research has also demonstrated that these dual purposes are also quite intertwined, as members’ sustained engagement in the alliance over time depends on the perceived value of participation in terms of meeting their own organization’s needs. Inherent in the structure of multistakeholder alliances and their dual purposes is an implicit assumption: that the distributed expertise in a multistakeholder alliance is available for the pursuit of both collaborative goals and knowledge transfer. However, each of these goals may actually require access to different sets of expertise. Thus, a potentially overlooked mechanism for overcoming the challenges of balancing the dual purposes of multistakeholder alliances may reside in the relationships between the goals being pursued and the mechanisms for accessing the expertise needed to address them. Building on the framework of transactive memory systems, I use a qualitative approach to explore the factors that contribute to the development of expertise awareness, goal awareness, and the relationship between them in a multistakeholder alliance in the healthcare sector.