collabotation teams

Productivity in Collaboration-intensive



Abstract
Collaboration is a hot issue, and is to an increasing extent recognised as a key driver of overall business performance,
innovation capabilities and productivity. However, few companies methodically evaluate how well they perform in
the area of collaboration, and few companies have implemented management and leadership principles tosystematically improve collaborative performance. This article describes the commonly occurring mismatch between
the potential impact of collaboration on business performance and the attention given to collaboration. Furthermore,
the article explains why companies should approach collaboration strategically, and identify new ways of fostering
and facilitating collaboration in a structured manner.The article proposes a value perspective on collaboration and provides a framework for classifying and managing
different factors related to collaboration, and concludes with a list of specific action points for organisations that are
interested in improving their collaborative performance and obtaining a higher Return on Investment (ROI) on their
collaboration initiatives.
KeywordsCollaboration, management, business performance, knowledge work, eProfessional

1

Introduction

An MIT study on collaborative advantage [Hansen and Nohria, 2004] concludes that “firms
come into being in order to enable human beings to achieve collaboratively what they could not
achieve alone. If one accepts this as the true purpose of any organization, then the main focus of
executives’ attentionshould be on how to foster collaboration within their companies.” As an
important dimension of work, collaboration seems to be getting more attention both from
researchers and industrial practitioners. However, in a 2006 study of C-level executives, IBM
[IBM, 2006] found that collaboration and partnering is considered very important for innovation
by over 75 percent of the 765 executivesparticipating in the survey, yet only slightly more than
50 percent responded that they collaborate to the extent that is required to reap the potential
benefits. Hence, there still seems to be a gap between the perceived importance of collaboration,
and the actual attention paid to collaboration.
Collaboration is a dimension of work that has not yet been fully understood, neither in terms ofcomponents, patterns, routines, interactions, or business implications of new collaborative
strategies and approaches. Measuring knowledge worker productivity is notoriously difficult, as
the type of knowledge work that characterizes many different types of jobs today involves
complex interactions with others, and many intangibles that are difficult to relate to other key
metrics of corporateperformance such as profitability, top and bottom line growth, et cetera.
Whereas many tools promise efficiency gains, today’s knowledge work often depends on
creativity and innovation capabilities that require a more comprehensive definition of
productivity in a collaborative team context. Productivity is concerned with achieving business
objectives faster, but these business objectives may bedifficult to measure quantitatively. A

single sentence marketing slogan or a simple idea concerning a process improvement can have
much greater value than a product or a service that has required months or even years of
expensive development work. The most risky projects with the highest potential are typically
non-linear, shifting between breakthroughs and periods where there seem to belimited progress.
This non-linearity invalidates many traditional productivity measures, as the value is often
decoupled from measurable process outputs, at least along intermediary steps.
Despite the problems with evaluating and managing collaboration, a range of recent studies
emphasize the importance of collaboration as a key driver of business performance. One study
show that workplace...