Social Value Creation in Inter‐Organizational Collaborations in the Not‐for‐Profit Sector – Give and Take from a Dyadic Perspective

• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Author: Kathrin Weidner,James Wallace,Christiana Weber,Arne Kroeger
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12272
• Date: 01 September 2017

Social Value Creation in Inter-Organizational

Collaborations in the Not-for-Profit Sector – Give

and Take from a Dyadic Perspective

Christiana Weber, Kathrin Weidner, Arne Kroeger and

James Wallace

Leibniz University Hanover; Leibniz University Hanover; Leibniz University Hanover;

University of Bradford

ABSTRACT Organizations in the not-for-profit (NFP) sector are increasingly collaborating with

other organizations to mutually raise overall joint value created. However, literature on inter-

organizational collaborations in the NFP sector lacks a clear, empirically proven understanding

about which factors drive such joint value creation and whether and how these factors and their

effects differ for the two parties involved. Based on the relational view and an analysis of 121

partnership dyads, we identify that some factors governing the successful creation of joint value

differ for the two partners while others are relevant to both parties. Those latter factors, in turn,

differ in their effects on the respective outcome.

Keywords: dyadic analysis, inter-organizational collaboration, joint value, not-for-profit

sector, relational view

INTRODUCTION

The importance of inter-organizational collaboration has been demonstrated in nearly

all areas and sectors: business, economics, politics, and society. The not-for-profit (NFP)

sector is no exception. Many NFP organizations, such as social enterprises, are engaged

in collaborations with other organizations to maximize the overall joint value created by

the collaboration (Di Domenico et al., 2009; Montgomery et al., 2012). To generate this

mutual higher joint value, social enterprises, like their commercial counterparts, contin-

uously search for the partners that are most apt to leverage the performance of their col-

laboration (Lavie et al., 2012). The process of screening potential partners can be

facilitated by the knowledge that the involved parties have of which factors are

Address for reprints: Christiana Weber, Leibniz Universit€at Hannover, K€onigsworther Platz 1, D-30167

Hannover, Germany (christiana.weber@ufo.uni-hannover.de).

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C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 54:6 September 2017

doi: 10.1111/joms.12272

particularly strong predictors of partnership performance (the conditions under which

some collaborations perform better than others).

Researchers of inter-organizational relationships in the NFP sector have postulated

that complementarity of resources are a key antecedent of successful collaborations

(Dyer and Singh, 1998; Felicio et al., 2013; Jamali and Keshishian, 2009; Lavie et al.,

2012; Lefroy and Tsarenko, 2014; Luo, 2008; Sakarya et al., 2012). However, the litera-

ture offers no empirically grounded understanding of which party gives and/or receives

which type of resources to eventually create the aspired joint value (Austin and Seitanidi,

2012a). Furthermore, scholars on inter-organizational relationships usually address the

potential advantages resulting from those collaborations and thereby ignore potential

costs that are entailed (Jamali et al., 2011; Koschmann et al., 2012). The literature also

has no clear understanding of potential differences of such costs and benefits between

two collaborating parties (Austin and Seitanidi, 2012b). Authors of studies on this topic

have tended to focus on only one party in the relationship, neglecting the dyadic charac-

teristic of any collaboration (Koschmann et al., 2012; Sakarya et al., 2012; Schiller and

Almog-Bar, 2013).

We address these research gaps by investigating whether and how the factors driving

joint value creation and their effects potentially differ between the involved parties of

the partnerships in the NFP sector. To identify the factors associated with the effective-

ness of collaborations, we draw on Dyer and Singh’s (1998) frequently cited and highly

relevant relational view as the theoretical foundation of our study. Dyer and Singh

(1998) argued that four determinants – ‘complementary resources and capabilities’,

‘relation-specific assets’, ‘effective governance’, and ‘knowledge-sharing routines’ – lead

to relational rent, a jointly generated ‘supernormal profit’ (p. 662), which is described in

greater detail below. We investigate 121 inter-organizational collaborations in the NFP

context from a dyadic perspective this is 121 social enterprises and their most important

partner. Our sample that enables us to compare (i) the factors governing both parties’

successful joint value creation, and (ii) the influence those factors have on the joint value

creation of both organizations.

This article contributes to the literature on inter-organizational relationships in the

NFP sector and to the relational view. First, we identify antecedents of joint value creation

that differ between the two parties of inter-organizational collaborations. More precisely,

we find that material, and financial resources as well as building on self-enforcing gover-

nance mechanisms are relevant antecedents for social enterprises’, but not for partners’

joint value creation. Second, we identify success factors such as knowledge and relation-

specific investments that are relevant for both parties and show that the intensity of the

effect that these factors have on joint value creation is different for social enterprises than

for their partners. Third, by empirically demonstrating that relation-specific investments

are an important antecedent of joint value creation, we take account for the influence of

costs on joint value creation for the first time in research on inter-organizational collabo-

rations in the NFP sector. Fourth, we offer one of the few studies in this field with dyadic

data and can therewith provide empirical evidence of the relational view (albeit for three

of four dimensions thus far) as well as prove its applicability to the NFP sector.

We begin with a review of the literature on inter-organizational relationships in the

NFP sector. Adopting Dyer and Singh’s (1998) relational view, we develop three sets of

930 C. Weber et al.

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C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies