✴︎ Available only with purchase from publisher

“Among a collaborative leader’s most important duties is selecting a collaborative partner. Numerous perspectives, including resource dependency theory, institutional theory, transaction cost theory, and personality typologies, have been used to help explain this decision. Clearly, a collaborative leader would desire to work with an individual who has access to needed resources, has a personality that fits the network, and is familiar. However, such a perfect partner does not often, if ever, exist. Therefore, a collaborative leader must make trade-offs between the issues of resource access, personality, and familiarity. Using an experimental design, this study explores how collaborative leaders make these trade-offs when considering potential collaborative partners. The findings suggest that while prospective partner personality may be the most significant driver of the partnership decision, it is actually the combination of factors, especially personality and resource access that interact to determine partner desirability.”