Poster #72 - Willingness to Compromise: A Coping Response to Role Tensions in Intergovernmental Collaboration

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Intergovernmental settings are characterized by overlapping jurisdictions, political pressures, and fragmented authority structures, creating ample opportunities for conflicting expectations. Public managers play a critical role in navigating these conflicts, serving as boundary spanners to ensure the success of intergovernmental collaboration. Despite this important role, intergovernmental relations (IGR) scholarship has traditionally emphasized environmental and institutional explanations for the success and failure of intergovernmental collaborations, paying limited attention to how public servants experience and manage role ambiguity and role strain in practice. This research investigates how public managers respond to role tensions arising from intergovernmental collaboration. Specifically, we investigate willingness to compromise—the propensity to accept an alternative option that diverges from one’s initially preferred position—as a strategic coping response when facing collaboration challenges. We ask: (1) To what extent do local government managers adopt a willingness to compromise as a coping strategy in response to intergovernmental role tensions? and (2) How do organizational positions and professional resources condition the willingness to compromise? Rather than treating organizational position as a sufficient explanation for collaborative behavior, we examine how individual and professional characteristics shape willingness to compromise. We investigate these questions using data from the Local Government Administrative Procedures Study (LGAPS), a survey of U.S. county and city government employees (n = 514). The analysis model treats willingness to compromise (WTC) as a latent construct comprising three subdimensions: Satisficing, Flexibility, and Pragmatism. Structural modeling will examine how organizational position (managerial status), personal traits (gender, age, race, education), and professional engagement (tenure, intergovernmental collaboration experience, department) affect WTC. We anticipate that the activation of WTC subdimensions will vary by personal characteristics, that professional engagement will exert influence primarily through organizational position, and that the effects of personal traits will be moderated by organizational position. Therefore, this paper makes three contributions. First, it advances empirical research on the conditional activation of willingness to compromise as a coping response to role tensions in intergovernmental collaboration. Second, it advances understanding of the critical role individual characteristics and professional resources play in cross-boundary collaborations. Finally, the results can be used to offer practical guidance for those seeking to advance compromise in county and city intergovernmental relations.

Author

• Seohyeon Ko, University of Illinois, Chicago
  Presenting Author