Can Leadership Improve Interorganizational Collaboration? Field-Experimental Evidence From a Team-Based Leadership Training Intervention

Abstract

The delivery of coherent public services often depends on collaboration across organizations and organizational units, which is challenging and necessitates effective leadership. This article advances our knowledge about the value of leadership training for interorganizational collaboration. In a field experiment, 122 public healthcare managers from 68 organizational units were randomly assigned to a treatment or a control group. The treatment included a 10-month interorganizational team-based leadership training program, which focuses on establishing and sustaining shared direction, alignment, and commitment across organizational boundaries. The results from our analytic approach—including survey responses from the participating managers and more than 3,000 of their subordinates (frontline managers and employees) and 32 interviews before and after training—show that training has positive effects on relational coordination, structural coordination mechanisms, and overall collaborative quality as assessed by the participating managers and their frontline managers. We do not find significant effects among the frontline employees. We discuss our findings in relation to the literature on leadership training, nuances to existing theory, and implications for practice.