CroBo – Crossing Sector Boundaries: Forms, Conditions, and Challenges in the Public Sector
Complex challenges and recent developments such as digital transformation and demographic change are shifting the demands on public leaders and employees. They act and collaborate not only across departments and organizations, but increasingly also across sectors. Crossing sector boundaries comes with its own challenges. The public, private, and nonprofit sectors and their actors are shaped by profoundly different sector logics. Managing the complexity resulting from the heterogeneity of these logics requires new competencies and strategies from leaders and employees. This applies both to those who collaborate across sectors and to those who are confronted with new logics because they switch between sectors in the course of their career.
This research project explores forms, conditions, and challenges of cross-sector work and leadership in the public sector.
Among others, we focus on the following research questions:
- How do leaders address divergent logics in cross-sector collaborations?
- What are the conditions for the (successful) transition of leaders and employees between the public sector and other sectors?
- What challenges do “sector switchers” face and how can these challenges be addressed?
This empirical research project combines qualitative and quantitative methods, and uses both cross-sectional and longitudinal data to answer the research questions.
- Duration: 07/2022 - 06/2025
- Project lead: Prof. Dr. Rick Vogel, Project member: Sandra Henninger, M.A.
- Sponsor: /