To collaborate or not to collaborate: An exploratory model of the determinants of public administrators' attitudes toward intersectoral collaborations

A great deal of research has been conducted to address questions such as what is collaboration? why collaborate? how can collaboration be implemented successfully? and how can collaborative efforts be evaluated conceptually and normatively? Though public administrators' positive attitudes toward collaborations are regarded as a determining factor for successful collaborations, what factors might influence those attitudes and have we overlooked how those attitudes are shaped?;Culled from the literature on inter-organization studies, neo-institutional economics, network management theory and collaboration theory, this study attempts to establish the construct of public administrators' attitudes toward intersectoral collaborations and build up an exploratory model explaining how five sets of influencing factors--environmental factors, organizational factors, personal factors, perceived benefits and cost factors-- shape those attitudes.;Given the important role Chief Administrative Officers (CAOs) and city managers are playing in making and implementing public policy in the daily administration of U.S. cities, this study specifically focused on intersectoral collaborations proactively initiated by CAOs and city managers. Based on the data collected from a national survey sent to CAOs and city managers working for U.S cities with populations over 25,000, the proposed exploratory model was tested empirically by ordinary least square and ordered logit regressions. Based on the data analysis, the following four research questions are addressed. (1) To what extent and in what areas do municipal public administrators proactively initiate intersectoral collaborations to address complicated policy problems within their jurisdictions? or (2) Why do city administrators proactively initiate and sustain intersectoral collaborations? What are their motives? (3) What are city administrators concerned with when making a decision to initiate intersectoral collaborations? (4) What factors influence public administrators' attitudes toward intersectoral collaborations? Why do some public administrators proactively pursue intersectoral collaborations but others do not?;Primary findings of this study are: (1) CAOs and city managers are playing a very important role in initiating intersectoral collaborations. The majority of CAOs and city managers reported that in the last two years they initiated and formed collaborations with at least one nongovernmental entity in their jurisdictions. Nonprofit organizations are the primary collaborators for governments. Intersectoral collaborations initiated by CAOs and city managers rarely involved private businesses or citizen groups alone. (2) Currently the majority of intersectoral collaborations remain at the second developmental stage, sharing resources. The ideal form of intersectoral collaborations strongly advocated by students of collaborations-- governments, private businesses, nonprofit organizations and citizen groups collaborating together, sharing resources, knowledge, power and responsibilities to address complicated social and economic problems--are still more rhetoric than reality. (3) The construct of public administrators' attitudes toward intersectoral collaborations are established by factor analysis and regression analyses, and consists of three dimensions: general belief, perceived jurisdictional appropriateness, and behavioral intention. Though the concept of intersectoral collaborations has been touted and promoted by the mass media, scholars of public administration and professional associations, there indeed exist significant variations in public administrators' attitudes toward intersectoral collaborations. The discrepancies among their attitudes are more salient when moving from the dimension of general belief to the dimension of behavioral intention. (4) CAOs and city managers' positive attitudes toward intersectoral collaborations in terms of general belief, perceived jurisdictional appropriateness and behavioral intention are primarily driven by their perceived benefits of intersectoral collaborations. Except for the significant negative impact of perceived loss of organizational autonomy on perceived jurisdictional appropriateness, none of the perceived costs of intersectoral collaborations, including administrative costs and accountability, are statistically significant in all regression models. (5) Besides supporting the arguments of resource dependence, and exchange theories that organizations initiate collaboration in order to get resources from their environment, legitimacy enhancement is the most important force that shapes CAOs and city managers' attitudes toward intersectoral collaborations. (6) Though as feminists argued, this study indeed finds that female public administrators may be more positive influences on intersectoral collaborations than male public administrators, the gender difference, nonetheless, is only significant at the normative level, i.e., general belief. (7) CAOs and city managers' behavioral intentions toward intersectoral collaboration are really pragmatically oriented, which indicates that to collaborate or not is indeed a strategic choice of public administrators. The more that complicated policy problems are recognized, the more potential collaborators are available, the less organizational rigidities are perceived, the more benefits such as efficiency attainments, capacity building and legitimacy enhancement can be achieved, the more they are familiar with nongovernmental entities within their jurisdictions, the more likely CAOs and city managers would proactively pursue intersectoral collaborations. Personal factors such as prior experience, personal propensity to trust, gender, age, education, working experience and professional affiliations do not show significant influence on the behavioral intentions of CAOs and city managers toward intersectoral collaborations. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...