Middle Managers as Agents of Collaboration by Paul Williams

Author:Paul Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

These observations reflect a focus on the importance of adhering to, and practising a set of moral standards such as integrity, honesty, openness, being respectful and above all, trustworthiness.

Trust in collaborative relationships

Trust is generally considered to be at the very core of personal relationships, and its importance in collaborative settings cannot be underestimated because of the increased focus of public management on tackling complex public policy problems and issues that cross the boundaries of single organisations, and that require cooperation and collaboration between diverse actors and agencies to resolve them. 6 et al (2006: 117) suggest that:

it is important for managers in organisations to take some pains to develop rich appreciations of the specific contextual and institutional characteristics of the network environment – and the trust relations of this environment – and to make their decisions about the strategies for trust and trustworthiness in the light of this appreciation.

Agranoff (2003: 22) comments that:

Social capital, or the built-up reservoir of good will that flows from different organisations working together for mutual productive gain, no doubt is the ‘glue’ that holds people together or the ‘motivator’ that moves the process along. But in terms of what helps to steer networks, it is clearly trust, the obligation to be concerned with others’ interests, that allows for the network to do its work, select its leaders, keep its members, and most important, to broker those decisions it must make.

Milward and Proven (2006: 10) argue that: ‘the currency of a network is the trust and reciprocity that exist among its members’ and ‘the more trust and reciprocity in the network, the greater the ability of the network to accomplish shared goals’. They proceed to argue that: ‘The task of network managers is to increase the stock of trust and reciprocity by creating incentives (using resources) and to increase their collaborative skills to build relationships within the network to accomplish network goals.’ Trust involves the suspension of risk leading to cooperation, flexibility, innovation, learning and an increase in cost-effectiveness; whereas distrust encompasses regulation, behavioural control, high transaction costs and low, predicable gains. La Porte (1996: 69) conceptualises trust in public organisation networks from the vantage points of three types of networker and argues that:

net riders seek to arrange relationships with other net members so that they can trust them and work out the efficient monitoring means to be assured that other exchange partners can continue to be trusted within a more or less fixed system of incentives. (In a sense, they seek to reduce the transaction costs of incipient suspicion.) Net throwers examine the political, legal, and economic conditions that foster or diminish the likelihood that net members will become and will stay trustworthy. Attentive outsiders seek insights about the leverage outsiders can play as monitors or enhancers of trustworthiness, or as destroyers of trusted relations.

The notion of trust has attracted a large body of inter-disciplinary literature, and consequently its understanding is fraught with ambiguity, lack of specificity and debate. Oomsels and Bouckaert’s (2014) review of

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