Organizational context and collaboration on international projects: The case of a professional service firm

In project teams that are distributed across the international subsidiaries of a firm, collaboration can be a challenge. The organizational context of projects is not always conducive to international collaboration. Priorities and interests of sub-teams are likely to differ from those of the central team. In a grounded theory study of international client projects in a project-based organization, the impact of organizational context on collaboration is explored. It was found that the organizational context can provide important resources such as authority, policies, procedures and systems that can be appropriated to enable collaboration. However, this applies only when there are drivers for collaboration, consisting of interdependency and interest in the project's success. Even in a context not conducive to collaboration, the drivers encourage teams to constitute informal mechanisms, enabling some level of collaboration. A framework for the impact of organizational context on collaboration in international projects is presented.