Based on research by Douglas Schuler and Balaji Koka

Key findings:

• Collaboration is often seen as the best way to solve humanitarian issues.
• But institutional barriers from donors or governments, along with a competitive mindset, can impede collaboration.
• New thinking about donors, public policies, backbone organizations and the mindset of organizational leaders is needed to prompt widespread collaboration.

Say you work for an organization fighting famine in the Horn of Africa. Thousands of refugees cross the borders there in dire need of attention. Lacking food, water and shelter, most are malnourished, and many are suffering from contagious diseases. 

Your organization is tasked with helping these people. But there are dozens of other organizations that also want to help. Some focus their efforts on promoting human rights, others on providing medical care, still others on distributing food. Each group wants to be seen as a leader, partly to attract more donor and government support. 

So what happens? At first, there’s a spirit of cooperation. There are so many people who need help and not enough hands to do it all. As more organizations arrive, however, competition creeps in. The refugees begin to suffer as support becomes less coordinated. What started as an emergency evolves into a full-blown catastrophe. Finally, it becomes clear that without concerted action, hundreds or even thousands of lives will be lost. How can these competing organizations, all of whom have the refugees’ best interests at heart, band together to serve them better? 

Rice Business professors Douglas A. Schuler and Balaji Koka set out to discover what factors can bring organizations together to solve a humanitarian problem – and what factors ultimately drive them apart. To study the challenges, they examined similar issues affecting Houston’s food deserts: areas where residents have limited access to affordable, nutritious food. 

Half a million Houstonians live in areas the USDA defines as food deserts, most of them in predominantly minority and lower-income communities. And nearly three-quarters of a million Houstonians don’t know where their next meal is coming from – a statistic that puts the city above the national average for food insecurity and has drawn the attention of a number of charitable organizations. 

Schuler and Koka observed that while there was some degree of cooperation between these organizations, there was also considerable discord. Informal coalitions and collaborations did help deliver quality food to those who needed it, but the coordination wasn’t systematic, which meant that the problem of food insecurity was a long way from being resolved. 

Why would it take multiple organizations to tackle this issue? One factor had to do with ambiguity in the ways different groups perceived the problem. Some groups saw food scarcity as a nutritional issue, and others as a matter of injustice. Still others saw it as a reflection of the need for community agriculture. The sheer variety of definitions meant there was an opportunity for multiple groups to work the problem from different perceptual angles. 

Each group also defined its target demographic in a different way, the researchers found, which meant that their combined efforts helped a large and diverse group of people. 

Actually solving the problem, however, would take more than multiple groups with multiple approaches. While the groups could work together in loose coalitions, there were barriers that prevented them from working together systematically. The first was bureaucratic: funding institutions and government agencies often imposed requirements that limited the flexibility of aid workers. 

In some instances, these institutions actually created disincentives to systemic collaboration. Funders tended to focus on quick metrics, such as number of meals served, pounds of food distributed or number of children enrolled in a nutrition or gardening program. The researchers also found that donors might make just a short-term commitment, funding programs for a year or two to address problems that could take a decade or more to actually solve. Similarly, public policy often worked against collaboration by imposing tight parameters on the kinds of services that could be offered.  

Under these circumstances, Schuler and Koka concluded, it was more likely that organizations would compete with each other than work together. In the effort to bring healthy food to Houston’s food deserts, as in other humanitarian endeavors, there was no single coordinating agency to keep all the groups in line, so priorities tended to shift over time. The result? The long-term goal of finding a sustainable solution to food insecurity loses out to the short-term incentives of outperforming other organizations. 

But there are ways to encourage teamwork even among unrelated groups. Funders and government agencies should be willing to invest more in capacity-building efforts, the researchers concluded, and to move away from measuring short-term programmatic outputs, such as the number of meals served by a particular pantry in a single day. Shifting to a long-term understanding of a problem would limit the competitiveness that creeps in when groups vie for better quarterly metrics to attract grants and donations. Other measures to promote cooperation might include forming a backbone organization to coordinate services across disparate organizations.

Importantly, Schuler and Koka argue, organizations could make great strides by changing their mindset from one of competition to one of cooperation. They argue that organizational leaders need to refocus their efforts on core social goals instead of private organizational goals. The goal of humanitarian aid, after all, is not to please donors, but to help people in need. And getting credit for your good work only matters if that work alleviates people’s suffering – now and in the future. 

Schuler, D. A. & Koka, B. R. (2019). "Challenges of social sector systemic collaborations: What’s cookin’ in Houston’s food insecurity space?" Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University.

Based on research by Utpal Dholakia, René Algesheimer and Călin Gurău

• Globalization has changed how we work. More than ever, remote workers do the jobs we once did face to face.
• Despite the growing influence of virtual work, little is known about what influences a virtual work team’s performance.
• Managers need to develop models that measure and predict virtual team performance, focusing on worker motivation.

Managers are always hunting for ways to measure performance. They need to know what’s succeeding and what’s not, so they can make adjustments and improve a work team’s output. This has led to countless studies that looks at ways to measure and boost employee performance. Indeed, one recent study showed there were more than 130 models and frameworks for measuring team performance in the workplace.

But how we do business has been changing in the last two decades. Communication technology and information sharing increasingly has decentralized the work force. More and more people are working remotely. Consider telecommuters, online messenger services such as Slack and customer service call centers routing their calls across the world. What forces determine how these virtual teams function?

In a study, Rice Business professor Utpal Dholakia and colleagues René Algesheimer of the University of Zurich and Călin Gurău of GSCM-Montpellier Business School looked closely at what motivates remote teams and how to measure what they do. They began with a standard input-mediator-output-input model (IMOI) to measure team characteristics such as size, tenure, communication, strategic consensus and intentions. Then they dove further, including expected team performance, actual team performance and past team performance into the equations. Finally, they analyzed the influence of motivational – desire to perform – and rational – shared goals – dimensions.

To conduct the research, Dholakia, Algesheimer and Gurău analyzed professional computer gaming teams, reasoning that such teams work together in highly competitive environments. The gamers’ lack of organizational context, meanwhile, eliminated any bias that could be linked to traditional institutional structures such as culture and goals. There was a downside, however: The gaming teams didn’t fully replicate the situation of virtual teams in business organizations.

Still, by choosing the European Electronic Sports League (ESL) the researchers were able to pick from more than half a million teams that play in excess of 4 million matches a year. In the end, 606 teams participated in the study by answering a questionnaire in the course of a year. The teams all had stable structures and specific objectives, strategies and training, just like virtual work teams. Data was also collected from the ESL database and included in the model.

The findings: Most studies do not consider expected and actual team performance in their calculations. This is important because research shows a strong link between expectation and performance. Including both sets of results can help managers choose the right steps to enhance team strategy and effectiveness. (The study did not analyze issues such as trust, training, conflict resolution or leadership, areas Dholakia recommends for further research).

The framework devised by Dholakia and his colleagues gives researchers a more precise way to analyze remote or international teamwork. It also could help guide managers in examining a team’s cultural diversity, and how that might affect output. In a time when the workplace is growing ever less tangible, Dholakia’s model is a sturdy tool to measure what’s happening out there.

Utpal Dholakia is the George R. Brown Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Algesheimer, R., Dholakia, U. and Gurău, C. (2011). Virtual team performance in a highly competitive environment. Group & Organization Management, 36(2), 161-190.