Metaorganizational Designs : Managing Inter-Organizational Initiatives

Metaorganizations, as emerging for instance in the electromobility sector, are sophisticated organizational designs, developed to manage extremely complex tasks. Metaorganizations are, however, fragile architectures. If the diversity of interests cannot be resolved, and if the collaboration cannot be stabilized on a lasting basis, leading to the loss of important actors, then the whole organizational architecture is at risk to collapse. At the same time, Metaorganizations may offer possibilities to its members lying beyond what can be achieved by individual actors - a central factor for their increasing empirical occurrence. Its main attributes are the emergence of solidifying goals, the permeability of its organizational boundaries, a high intensity for coordination and bottom-up integration, the use of resources without their ownership, as well as incentives between the poles of individual and collective welfare.