The Center for Organizational Leadership and Transformation

Charles Heckscher and Saul Rubinstein, directors   School of Management and Labor Relations • Rutgers University   50 Labor Center Way • New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-8553   Tel: 732-932-9503 Email: info@cwt-ru.org

Mission:

The Center for Organizational Leadership and Transformation advances the knowledge and practice of the widespread move from bureaucratic hierarchies to team-based, flexible work systems that can leverage resources across boundaries. It does this by: building collaborative research networks and projects; involving companies, unions, and other organizations in learning dialogues in which they can reflect on their experiences; providing education and consultation to organizations making this transition; and publicizing the case for organizational change and building a network of support.

Documents: Collaborating on School Reform: Creating Union-Management Partnerships to Improve Public School Systems Collaboration and the quality of health care delivery (draft) Powerpoint presentation The Firm as a Collaborative Community: introduction The Collaborative Enterprise: introduction The local union revisited: new voices from the front lines

Research and publications:

We have explored the effectiveness of collabortive union-management partnerships as an approach to school reform by documenting and conducting extensive research in a set of partnerships throughout the country. Initial results are reported in Collaborating on School Reform.

We have sought to undertand why teamwork in medical care is so difficult to achieve, through fieldwork in acute cardiac care units observing interactions among the different providers, from nurses to nutritionists to doctors. A paper based on that research has been submitted for publication, and others are in preparation.

We conducted research on on the conditions for collaborative organization in over 25 companies; the results were published in The Collaborative Enterprise, Yale University Press 2007.

A project on “collaborative community” explored the problem of the creation and maintenance of trust in complex knowledge-focused organizations. This brought together sociologists and political scientists with business researchers and practitioners for a series of discussions that built a common theoretical framework and a set of linked empirical studies. The outcome was published in 2006 as The Firm as a Collaborative Community (Oxford University Press).
Research on accountability in complex team-based organizations, based on interviews and observations in seven companies, were the basis of a PhD dissertation by Carlos Martin.

Next:

• We are continuing to conduct research on collaborative organization of school systems, with the support fo the Gates Foundation.
• We are conducting a study on the value base of collaborative systems; an initial publication is a case study for Harvard Business School on the values transformation process at IBM. Research is ongoing at other companies.
• We are developing a survey to identify the degree of collaborative culture in organizations.