Project info
Project name
9.4: Cooperation Dynamics in Organizations
Work package
- Work
Sustainability threat
- Feedback Cycles
Challenge
- Reconciling stakeholder interests
Study info
Description of Study
We examine how cooperation is produced and maintained in a project-based consulting setting where team membership is temporary, work is hybrid and spatially dispersed, and hierarchical oversight is limited. Through semi-structured interviews and a visual mapping exercise tracing cooperation across project trajectories, we show that cooperation in this setting is sustained through structural investments in relational accessibility, bilateral coaching, feedback routines, and coordination practices. These structural arrangements are, on closer reading, doing cultural work: building the relational trust and shared identity that a relatively new team has not yet had time to develop on its own. Cooperation here is functional but fluctuating, rising and falling across project phases, and vulnerable to strain when interaction frequency drops or team compositions shift.
Study research question
How does cooperation emerge and endure in project-based consulting teams where team membership is temporary and continuous physical co-presence is no longer the standard?
Collection provenance
- -
Collection methods
- Interview
Personal data
-
External Source
Source description
File formats
Data types
- Structured
Languages
- English
Coverage start
Coverage end
Spatial coverage
Collection period start
—
Collection period end
—
Variables
Unit
Unit description
Sample size
Sampling method
Individuals
consultants within one consulting division of a multinational company based in the Netherlands, including junior associates, senior associates, junior managers, senior managers, and one partner. Age range approximately 25 to 60 years, with most members in their twenties and thirties. Dutch language proficiency required for client-facing work. The team has limited ethnic diversity. The division is relatively new within the broader organisation, with several early-career consultants among the participants. Work arranged in hybrid format across client sites, office, and home.
11
Voluntary self-selection within a single case organisation. The entire consulting division was introduced to the study in an internal session and team members were invited to sign up for interviews if they wished. This is a purposive single case study design, selecting a theoretically relevant setting characterised by hybrid work, fluid teams, and high professional autonomy.
Organizations
—
1
—
Hypothesis
Theory
This is a qualitative case study. It does not test hypotheses but develops analytical categories inductively from interview data, organised into four themes: foundational conditions enabling cooperation, initiation practices, coordination practices, and points of strain.
The study draws on practice-based approaches to cooperation (Schein, 2010; Fine, 1984), relational coordination theory (Gittell, 2002), and literature on organisational identity and normative control in professional service firms (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007). JPMT serves as background context rather than as a formally tested framework.
Variable type
Variable name
Variable description
Discipline-specific operationalizations
Conflict of interest
Data packages
Publications
Documents
Filename
Description
Date
Ethics
Ethical assessment
Yes
Ethical committee
Ethics committee Sociology RUG