Why Partnering in Organizations?

We are looking for a simple cultural change process to bridge our present into the desired future; a method that can be “strategically staged” and easily implemented by our managers. Partnering provided answers to all these and more as explained hereafter.
Considering the Key elements of partnering as a start: commitment, equity, trust, development of mutual goals and objectives, implementation, continuous evaluation, timely responsiveness. These foster organizational development as shown in fig. below.



Figure: Partnering-adopted from Fisher, 1990

First: A Contract Friendly Process
Partnering uses a structured workshop process as a tool for building relationships and driving team performance. It presents a moral contract (charter) between project stakeholders committing to act with a “best for project” perspective.
Due to its moral nature, the partnering contract does not contradict with other contractual relationships but complements them to the best interest of all stakeholders (replace legalistic win-lose with a synergistic win-win culture). Statistics support this declaration since litigations decreased significantly when partnering was introduced.

Second: A Performance Driver
It is precarious to maintain high performance in our organization. There are some “momentary” performance boosts like technological advantages, great leaders, downsizing, and the like (Kotter and Haskett, 1992). However it is partnering that provides the two key aspects for “maintaining” high performance:
o Organizational Flexibility
o Motivating organizational people to maintain potential.

Third: National Cultures’ Integration
As stated earlier, partnering is based on some values like trust, open communications and shared objectives; different nations have these values at different levels of their cultural behaviors. Therefore, the depth of the Organizational cultural change process will vary according to the gap to be closed between Partnering and National values.
Partnering can extend either horizontally (across departments/equal stakeholders) or vertically (along the hierarchy). In both cases, we need to “accept” the existing national culture’s values and modify the partnering process to better fit with these values. The importance of this concept escalates when we work across different cultures (Hofstede, 1980)

with more to follow on this topic,
samer