Wellsprings of Bureaucratic Collaboration: Identity, Trust, and Agency Performance in Colombia

Abstract

The literature on collaborative public management has focused on studying how public servants create collaborative structures in their workplaces to achieve organizational goals. The emphasis of these studies has been on the analysis of whole network level analysis and inter-organizational collaboration. Much less emphasis has been placed on studying bureaucrats' behavior in the subfield of inter-personal collaboration. While we know collaboration takes place, our understanding of why bureaucrats engage in collaborative behavior in the first place and how it affects policy performance is lacking. I analyze how bureaucrats' collaboration is initiated and sustained (at the micro-level) and how bureaucrats' collaboration affects performance (at the macrolevel) through three interrelated contributions based on a multi-method research design.

The dissertation evidence comes from the Colombian case. The high levels of bureaucrats' professionalization and public organizations' complexity make this case theoretically meaningful. There is also significant variation at the individual level and at the regional level that allows testing the dissertation's hypotheses.

The multi-method research design includes the creation of novel datasets based on an original conjoint survey experiment, survey data, and original interviews conducted on Colombian bureaucrats in 2019 and 2020. Additionally, the project used preexisting datasets based on perceptions from 37,000 public employees and datasets with organizational performance measures such as fiscal performance and education in Colombia between 2013 to 2018.

The dissertation findings show that some social identities explain the origins of collaboration among bureaucrats and that managers' efforts to foster collaboration positively impact agency performance. Specifically, managerial actions that promote collaboration through teamwork activities predict higher levels of organizational performance. At the individual level, collaboration occurs when bureaucrats share some social identities (such as having attended the same university, have the same profession, and were born in the same city), and collaboration is sustained when bureaucrats build trust and reciprocity.

The research contributes to the literature on collaborative management in a comparative context by testing conceptual and empirical implications of inter-personal collaboration based on a multi-method approach. It also offers practical strategies to managers who seek to improve policy performance by fostering collaboration among employees.