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The purpose of this chapter is to develop the idea of enhancing collaboration within a public context. It does so by exploring the challenge of working with others across organisational boundaries, when addressing complex issues. It discusses research findings from a Scotland based public service study concerned with collaborative practice and presents an empirical analysis of what it means to work in a relational way. The existing literature is reviewed alongside the study findings, connecting with contemporary theories and debates in the fields of collaboration, leadership and public administration.

The empirical work detailed in this chapter drew from collective and relational leadership theories which influenced the study design and methodological approach. The data collection method took the form of semi-structured interviews and data were analysed using thematic analysis supported by data mapping exercises. Data were obtained through interviews of 20 participants from multiple public service roles and organisations who were involved in similar activities linked to collaboration.

This chapter promotes an approach where disrupting traditional collaborative practice offers new insights in terms of (1) understanding the group process and (2) recognising what processual and behavioural adjustments can be made to enrich collaborative work. This approach was found to offer a number of benefits linked to building trust, promoting meaningful dialogue and altered the conversations that people chose to have.

The reconceptualisation of collaboration specifically illustrates what it means to ‘work in a more relational way’ and how it is understood by those attempting to build collaborative capacity, sustain public services and improve outcomes for citizens and communities. As such, it is this focus on relationships that is considered innovative and important to creating the open collaborative culture required for addressing complex issues and working across organisational boundaries.

Ask leaders what their organizations need more of to thrive, and many will identify collaboration. Yet many collaborative efforts fail. A focus on the inner workings of teams, to the exclusion of the ecosystem in which teams work, has masked the importance of a collaborative context. We undertook a single case study of an exemplar firm with the intent of offering a nuanced illustration of the collaborative workplace. We illustrate how three contextual factors related to work, relationships, and behaviors shift the setting from a place where collaboration is hard to do, to one that embodies collaboration as a widespread competence.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the collaborative information seeking (CIS) behaviors of students conducting authentic group work projects, and the features of a collaborative search system that are most useful to these students.

An exploratory study was conducted with 41 participants in ten groups working on an in class, for-credit group project assignment utilizing a collaborative search system. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered on the everyday search practices of students over the course of the group project, along with quality scores for the sources found.

Results showed that student behavior during their CIS related to the quality of their search outcomes, as the effective and efficient searchers found better quality sources. Students’ pre-task attitudes and experiences toward group work also relate to the quality of their search outcomes. Student feedback demonstrated the importance of making collaborative search tools convenient, lightweight, and easy to use.

These findings may be useful to researchers designing and studying the effectiveness of collaborative search tools, and to instructors planning to incorporate group projects into their classes.

In this paper, the authors document the authentic behaviors and attitudes of students conducting group projects in an classroom setting, and offer specific recommendations for developers of collaborative search systems. These findings provide greater context for CIS research into the collaborative search behaviors of students conducting group work projects.

The complexities and challenges inherent in research often require collaborative rather than solitary or team‐based forms of working. This paper seeks to open new perspectives onto the nature of collaborative research and onto strategies for developing the capacity of researchers to engage in it.

The paper outlines a speculative model of collaborative working in higher education that is rooted in critical realist perspectives, using it to ground a conceptual analysis of a stage model of expertise for collaborative working taken from the researcher development framework (RDF) developed in the UK by the organisation Vitae.

The paper highlights the contribution that theory can make to the practice of researcher development, drawing out the relevance of personal engagement, professional dialogue and collaborative vehicles to support shared practice in pursuit of mutual goals. In this way, it identifies gaps within the stage model that pertain to relational, disciplinary, situational and other elements. The paper articulates insights for the development of the capacity of researchers for collaborative working that prioritise dialogue that is situated within given contexts for research. The analysis draws out implications for the development of collaborative capacity of such notions as corporate agency and collaborative reach.

This paper articulates a novel approach to conceptualising capacity for collaborative research and offers a theoretical critique of a given descriptor taken from Vitae's RDF. As such it assists in developing the scholarly basis for the field of researcher development.

The twenty‐first century is now seen as the time for the construction industry to embrace new ways of working if it is to continue to be competitive and meet the needs of its ever demanding clients. Collaborative working is considered by many to be essential if design and construction teams are to consider the whole lifecycle of the construction process. Much of the recent work undertaken on collaborative working has focused on the delivery of technological solutions with a focus on web (extranets), CAD (visualisation), and knowledge management technologies. However, it is now recognised that good collaboration does not result from the implementation of information technology solutions alone, the organisational and people issues, which are not readily solved by pure technical systems, need also to be resolved. This paper aims to address this issue.

Work discussed in this paper brings together the benefits provided by technology, with organisational issues, and people issues, in developing a framework to implement effective collaboration. The research uses a literature search, semi‐structured interviews and a questionnaire to gain the industry's requirements for effective collaboration in the construction sector. From these requirements a develop‐test‐refine approach was taken to develop the methodology for effective collaborative working for construction.

The findings reported in this paper are a summary of the results from the semi‐structured interviews and questionnaire used to gain the industry's requirements. They show that a focus on the “softer” issues (business process and an organisations' people) rather than a technology focus is needed to plan and implement collaborative working more effectively in projects. An initial approach is discussed in this paper concerning a structured approach to be developed further in the research to highlight to the industry the issues associated with the planning and implementation of effective collaborative working in projects.

This paper uses a socio‐technical approach to the planning and implementation of effective collaborative working in construction. It combines technology with the people and business aspects of collaborative working to provide an approach which can enable stakeholders in a project to benefit fully from having a collaborative working approach to their projects.

Although proactivity is thought to have positive effects in the workplace, researchers still need to learn more about the contingent aspects of these effects. Proactivity, a challenging form of promotive behavior that is generally desired by organizations, can lead to unexpected consequences such as role overload, job strain, and conflict with coworkers, which may undermine future proactivity. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of proactive behavior on job satisfaction, affective commitment, and conflict with coworkers, in the context of collaborative work. This study investigates the extent to which collaborative behavior, an affiliative form of promotive behavior, can mitigate the impact of proactive behavior on conflict and promote positive individual psychosocial outcomes, thus making proactive behavior more sustainable in the workplace.

Using a survey methodology, data were collected from a sample of 170 teachers engaged in collaborative work.

Results show that both proactivity and collaborative behavior positively impact affective outcomes, but have opposite effects on conflict. Collaborative behavior complements proactive behavior in that it enhances the effects of proactivity on satisfaction and reduces its impact on conflict.

Creating the appropriate organizational conditions to support employee proactivity is critical for enhancing proactive employees’ work experience and success, effectively motivating and retaining them, and promoting future proactivity. The results indicate that collaboration creates a context where the positive effects of proactivity are enhanced and its negative effects are weakened.

This research is one of the first studies to examine the interactive effects of proactivity and collaboration. The study shows that collaborative behavior can play an important role in enhancing the benefits of proactivity. Thus, the research advances a contingency perspective of proactivity and contributes to a better understanding of its effects.

This paper aims to understand the current state and challenges of deploying collaborative applications in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Germany.

A survey of 101 SMEs in Germany showed how intensively collaborative applications are used today and the positive and negative effects associated with their use. Analyses proved correlations between the use of collaborative applications, the need for cooperation within SMEs and the effects and benefits of their use.

The company representatives surveyed reported a positive balance of their pro and con experiences with collaborative applications. The use of collaborative applications closely interacts with work-related demands: the more complex the requirements of joint action, the broader the benefits and challenges are of their use. The data also revealed three gaps between demand of cooperation and use of specific applications, supporting the argument that implementation of collaborative applications is challenging for SMEs. A successful use requires major changes in work systems and culture of the company.

The data of the survey are not representative of the population of SMEs in Germany.

These empirical findings contribute a unique as well as substantive view of today’s state of digitalisation of project communication and management within SMEs, specifically their deployment of collaborative software.

The paper aims to compare the coordination of supply chain networks in contractually different complex construction projects.

A comparative case study of the coordination of collaborative work in two successful hospital construction projects was conducted. One of the projects applied multiple dyadic contracts, whereas the other project applied one multi-party contract between the parties. The projects were located in the USA. Data were collected by observing the coordination on the construction sites for six weeks and by conducting 72 interviews.

The paper shows that depending on the contract type, the timing and extent of complementary procedural coordination differs during projects. Compared with one multi-party contract, the dyadic contracts needed to be complemented during the design phase with three additional procedural coordination mechanisms: organizational design, processes for collaborative work and integrated concurrent engineering sessions. Additionally, common rules of conduct were taken into use during the construction phase. However, regardless of the contract type, procedural coordination mechanisms, such as co-located working, collaborative decision-making in inter-organizational meetings, a liaison role and shared project goals were needed throughout the projects.

If multiple dyadic contracts are applied, procedural coordination mechanisms have to be co-created by all supply chain parties at the beginning of the project.

The paper provides an understanding on successful contractual and complementary procedural coordination mechanisms of supply chain networks in complex construction projects.

The lack of collaborative working within the UK construction industry is a long-standing issue that has often been highlighted. As a result, the construction industry in the UK is encouraged to use novel procurement methods to create a collaborative working environment. This study aims to explore the collaborative features of the three new models of construction procurement introduced by the UK Government Construction Strategy in 2012.

Existing research/literature was reviewed to establish the key collaborative features of the new procurement models, and a questionnaire survey was adopted to obtain views of industry practitioners. A Relative Importance Index was used to analyse the collected data.

The sample of construction practitioners surveyed largely agrees with the effectiveness of collaborative features integrated within the models, with the benefits offered by early contractor involvement being seen as the most effective feature allowing collaboration. Contractual incentives, improved communication procedures and constant reflection and feedback can be used as effective strategies to enable greater collaboration in projects that use these new procurement models.

Findings reported in the paper could help achieve greater collaboration in construction projects executed using the new models of construction procurement.

This study sheds light on the scepticism and/or conviction of industry practitioners regarding the collaborative benefits offered by the new procurement models, which have not yet been subjected to significant academic scrutiny.

This paper aims to design a collaborative model amongst faculty and librarian to support teaching and research congruent with the Vietnamese context.

The mix-method research is used in three stages to (1) study the situation and problems of faculty-librarian collaboration by using semi-structured interviews with 29 participants, (2) survey factors influencing the collaboration from 455 samples, (3) evaluate and arrange the influence level of factors from 18 experts' perspectives.

The research results show that in order to enhance the quality and gain goals of the collaboration, it is necessary to meet three elements, in which universities must (1) meet essential conditions and factors, (2) identify collaborative objectives and activities, collaborative process/guidelines, and evaluating collaboration; and (3) clarify the participation and support of stakeholders to achieve common outcomes.

This study carried out with representatives for key informant group at four universities in Vietnam, thus, the research results could not cover all current situation of the faculty–librarian collaboration at universities.

This paper provides the detail picture of faculty–librarian collaboration practices and factors having influence this activity at Vietnamese universities. Then, the findings help administrators, faculty and librarians understand and deploy a reasonable plan in accordance with the university's features to enhance the effectiveness and success of the faculty–librarian collaboration.