This research investigates collaboration -- a time-limited multi-party effort to produce an explicit product or service with cooperative and coordinated action across organizational and/or national boundaries. The model examines key success features and core attributes of effective global collaborations in the presence of the contextual conditions. The focus of the investigation is on emergent processes required to work effectively when workers are geographically dispersed, culturally diverse, reliant on information technology, and lack shared history; and when stakeholder requirements are ambiguous, internal incentives are incongruent, deadlines are urgent, and the physical environment is in flux. Increasingly, these contextual conditions exist simultaneously, resulting in psychological, social, and organizational challenges that call into question assumptions of traditional organizational models.
Collaborations in the film industry, including film production and digital imaging where the contextual conditions are particularly pertinent, are investigated. The sample represents a large multinational, and four smaller organizations located in the U.S., New Zealand, France, and India, which represent different cultures and stages of industry and economic maturity. Taped interviews will be conducted with many individuals in each organization, across functions such as producer, director, production manger, director of photography, software designer, and special effects director. Content analysis will be used to identify, observe, and codify key collaborative challenges and solutions, to enable preliminary tests of the model, inductive refinement, identification of best practices, and to assist in securing collaborations for subsequent research.
Findings will expand theories of organizational structure and design, team effectiveness, and human resource development to better address contextual complexity. Research dissemination activities will involve academic and practitioner journal articles, a text book and trade book, conference presentations, and training and workshops for industry. In doing so, the research contributes a theoretical explanatory model applicable to a wide variety of complex contexts that will increase the effectiveness for a multitude of multicultural and multifunctional global collaborations.
