Working the PPP: Coordination in public-private partnerships

In this dissertation, I explore how work is carried out in public-private partnerships. Considering that such partnerships are between public and private agencies whose objective is to construct and operate public infrastructure, they emerge as a distinctive context, making the coordination of work potentially different from the coordination of work in firms and alliances. As such, I propose a model that focuses on how work is carried out through the use of coordination mechanisms by the use of context specific boundary objects and common ground. The antecedents to the use of these mechanisms, it is suggested, lie in the focus of the firm's business and the experience profile of the coordinating managers.;In the context of the Indian highway industry, which has been utilizing PPPs extensively, the proposed theoretical model was tested on a unique sample of 42 highway projects being executed in the PPP mode. While the perceptions of the use of coordination mechanisms were collected by carrying out a primary survey of the managers closely involved with these projects, data on firms and managers were collected from secondary sources.;The results suggest that, while a firm's focus on the technical domain of highway construction is associated with the emphasis placed on the use of both boundary objects and common ground, these effects are amplified when the manager has PPP experience. Further, it is found that while the firm's focus on PPP has no direct effects on the use of coordination mechanisms, if the manager tasked with the job of coordinating the project has a high firm tenure, the use common ground for coordination is deemphasized. The findings of the study – that a manager's firm tenure significantly reduces the use of common ground for coordination when the manager's firm tenure at a highly PPP focused firm is lengthy – are interesting in that they highlight the distinctiveness of PPP working. Also, the evidence provided by this study that managers' experience profiles can significantly affect how coordination of work is carried out makes this an important first study in the literature studying coordination, highlighting that the quality of human capital (i.e., capabilities/experience specific to the highway industry, PPP form, and the firm) affect the management of alliances (i.e., coordination of work performed at the organization's boundaries).