Professional Service Constellations: How Strategies and Capabilities Influence Collaborative Stability and Change

Abstract

Constellations—alliances among multiple firms—are used to perform complex, customized work in professional service. We examine two tensions inherent in multi-party collaborative work: managing hybrid systems, which are composed of individual and group tasks and outcomes, and aligning partners' logics of action. These two tensions provide firms the strategic choice with emphasizing individual or collective advantage. When constellation members pursue an individualist strategy, they employ an entrepreneurial logic. Constellations are a vehicle for honing their firm-distinctive expertise and enhancing their own opportunities. Given these firms' need for exposure to new learning and new markets from different partners and clients, the stability of the constellation is not of primary importance. This strategy promotes membership shifts in constellations and requires governance mechanisms for coordinating interactions among relative strangers. When constellation members pursue a collectivist strategy, they focus on their mutual benefits and employ a relational logic. Given these firms' need for intensifying relations with partners and clients, constellation members restrict interactions to certain select partners and clients and intensify their interactions. This strategy promotes stability in constellation membership and allows governance mechanisms specific to partners to develop. Due to positive feedback, these strategies develop certain capabilities and create specific relational patterns, which reinforce prior choices.

The Field of Inter‐organizational Relations

“…Thus, the chapters in the Handbook report increased empirical evidence of, and research on, private sector IORs involving multiplex objectives and relationships such as: business groups, chaebol, consortia, cooperatives, constellations, federations, inter-firm networks, keiretsu, network organizations, and so on (see e.g. Gomes-Casseres 1994; Jones et al 1998;Granovetter 2005). And as Geddes, Klijn, Knoke and Chen, and Sand-fort and Milward clearly demonstrate in their contributions to this volume, these multiplex structures manifest themselves in the public sector as well.…”

Niche and performance: the moderating role of network embeddedness

“…Such information can be transferred within a network in which more opportunities exist to clarify possible ambiguities and abstractions (Jones et al, 1998). Actors strongly tied in a network tend to have developed a relation-specific heuristic for processing complex and fine-grained information (Hansen, 1999).…”

Who You Know vs. What You Know: The Impact of Social Position and Knowledge on Team Performance

“…Although these inquiries confirm that knowledge is a major determinant of team performance, they do not focus objectively on each individual's ex ante knowledge relative to social position. In contrast to the literature on organizational learning, theories of social networks suggest that, while skills are one of many elements affecting team performance, such performance may be primarily dependent on the power and influence structure of a group's social network (Burt, 1992;Brass, 1984;Everett & Borgatti, 1999;Freeman, 1979;Jones, Hesterly, Fladmoe-Lindquist, & Borgatti, 1998;Krackhardt, 1999). The social network view posits that the contributions of individual actors within a team framework depend fundamentally on the relations between actors as opposed to actors' resources or knowledge (Burt, 1992).…”