A Study on the Creation of Collaborative Organizations and Collaborative Capabilities among Top Managers of Small-and Medium-sized Manufacturers

This paper attempts to show what kinds of collaborative organizational structures have been formed and managed by top managers of small- and medium-sized manufacturers and how they have acquired the capabilities to build inter-organizational collaborative relationships, using descriptive data on three top managers' behavioral practices. In particular, it focuses on the process of how emerging collaborative relations are organized into an organizational structure. Specifically, two different types of organizational structures—i.e., collaborative communities and project teams as sub-organizations within such communities—are examined.

Based on the three top managers' descriptive accounts of their collaborative behavior, the paper classifies the collaborative communities further into the following three different organizational types: managerial organization, value sharing/mutual learning organizations, and e businesses-initiating organizations. Then it discusses how the top managers have acquired capabilities to form and manage their respective collaborative communities, examining how they mobilized collaborative members and institutionalized collaboration in the process of forming each type of community as well as what roles the "coordinating function" (to be defined later) plays in organizing and managing project teams.