Cross-Sector Differences in Strategic Inter-organizational Networking Behavior

• In Event: Cooperation, Collaboration and Co-production

Abstract

The formation and impact of collaborative networks are at the heart of public management research. During the past three decades, public management scholars developed an extensive literature on inter-organizational collaboration. This literature largely focuses on how collaborative networks affect performance. Much less attention is given to organizations’ partner-selection behavior, especially heterogeneous logics of collaborative behavior across the public, nonprofit, and private sector. Such heterogeneity in collaborative behaviors appears in anecdotal evidence showing that stakeholders from different sectors are active at varying levels and choose partners out of strategic motivations. Cross-sector heterogeneity in networking behavior is an underappreciated yet significant area of research for network scholarship. We fill this gap by focusing on the diverse patterns of networking behavior due to organizations’ sectoral ownership.
Connecting theories of inter-organizational networks, institutional collective action to the literature on cross-sector comparison of organizational behavior, we theorize how partner-selection and intensity of networking behavior vary across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sector. We expect that the intensity of networking activities would be higher in the public and nonprofit sector than that in the for-profit sector, because public and nonprofit organizations rely on networking activities to build stakeholder support and to diversify their financial resources. For-profit organizations, on the contrary are constrained by market competition and less likely to engage in networking activities. We also expect that public and nonprofit organizations are more likely than for-profit organizations to form cross-sector networks, while for-profit organizations are more likely to interact with partners from the same sector.
Our empirical analysis draws from the health care context, and focuses on networking activities among American hospitals and organizations in their external environment (e.g. government agency, nonprofits, local business commerce, schools, etc.) in the top-50 largest U.S. urban areas in 2019. Combining organizational-level ego-centric survey data on hospitals’ networking activities with network-level data from hyperlink network analysis, we explore how partner-selection and networking activities differ across government-owned, nonprofit, and for-profit hospitals. The use of hyperlink network analysis offers an opportunity to extract, analyze and compare a large number of whole networks. Descriptive network analysis, exponential random graph models and multiple regressions are employed to test the hypotheses. We contribute to the literature on collaborative networks by showing the cross-sector heterogeneity in networking behavior. Our empirical strategy of combining hyperlink network analysis and ego-centric survey data also helps to reduce potential data-reporting bias from survey research on inter-organizations networks.

Authors

• Ling Zhu, University of Houston

• Hongtao Yi, The Ohio State University