Criteria of effectiveness in multiple cross-sectoral interorganizational relationships

As the popularity of interorganizational relationships (IORs) grows, the challenge of evaluating the effectiveness of achieving desired outcomes has emerged as a concern for both practitioners and academics [Atkinson, M., & Maxwell, V. (2007). Driving performance in a multi-agency partnership using outcome measures: A case study. Measuring Business Excellence, 11(2), 12–22; Callahan, K., & Kloby, K. (2007). Collaboration meets the performance measurement challenge. The Public Manager, 36(2), 9–24; Coulson, A. (2005). A plague on all your partnerships: Theory and practice in regeneration. International Journal of Public Sector Management 18(2), 151–163.]. The purpose of this paper is to empirically compare the effectiveness criteria used by a nonprofit Canadian sport organization and its partners embedded in multiple cross-sectoral relationships. To that end, three levels of effectiveness criteria were investigated: the community, network, and organization levels. A qualitative case study was conducted on the nonprofit sport organization and its multiple cross-sectoral partners. The results suggest that some criteria for measuring IOR effectiveness among partners were highly interrelated, some reflected competing values, some were shared across all partners, and some were ambiguous in the measures of effectiveness of IOR outcomes. Implications for future research and for practice are discussed.