Collaboration: Aligning resources to create and sustain partnerships

Academic-service partnerships are the future. These partnerships require a new paradigm and new practice models that necessitate change in how and where decisions are made as well as who is accountable for both the decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. The role of organizational leaders in this new paradigm becomes aligning resources to create and sustain partnerships. Partnerships are relationships and are only as effective as the communication between all entities. Decision-making is an important outcome of partnerships, yet there is little research regarding specific behavioral strategies that promote quality problem solving and decision-making. This paper extends the work of organizational theorist Ralph Stacey by proposing an event-driven typology of behavioral strategies for problem solving. The typology can assist organizational leaders to align resources for best practices in academic-service partnerships and be used as a framework for future research.