ABSTRACT
What happens when organizations join in a collaboration and form a new collective such as a partnership or alliance? Collaboration typically alters group boundaries and hence affects organizational identities and cultures. Collaboration shows to be a complex and dynamic process with high failure rates. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the often-neglected relevance of cultural interoperability as means to realize collaborations’ potential for growth and innovation. We provide a framework to assess how cultural differences impact interorganizational collaboration, and how to manage and use such differences, based on systematic feedback from the participants in the collaboration. The framework is based on three dimensions of effective collaboration: partner complementarity, compatibility and commitment, paired with 15 conditions of cultural interoperability, addressing among others, personal opportunities for growth, pride, unique contribution, cultural fit, motivation, trust and identification with the collaboration. Building on a real-life example of a Dutch–German military collaboration, we illustrate the application and implementation of the framework to monitor and guide the development of cultural interoperability in interorganizational collaborations.
