Understanding Collaboration in Multisourcing Arrangements: A Social Exchange Theory Perspective

As IT functions of clients are often outsourced to multiple vendors, all partners have to take the multisourcing arrangement into account when providing services. This paper examines how a client establishes strategic collaboration within a multisourcing arrangement. Due to heterogeneous, but also overlapping resources and heterogeneous strategic interests, collaboration between partners is challenging as they have to develop and manage IT services on an operational level at the same time. Social Exchange Theory is used to understand the complexity of collaboration within a multisourcing arrangement. Dependent on the client’s multisourcing objectives for its vendors collaboration tensions become apparent. Our research reveals that when client and vendors pay more attention to creating common goals, mutual collaboration between the partners’ employees is increased. This results in an improvement of the operational performance of the IT services. On an individual level, it was found that the behaviour of individuals may compensate for the lack of collaboration and the lack of exchange of information between partners. Furthermore the research suggests that partners within a multisourcing arrangement have to anticipate exogenous developments and adapt in order to be resilient.