Instrumental Collaboration: Why Autonomous Professionals Collaborate and How They Benefit

Firms benefit when their professional knowledge workers collaborate. Yet these knowledge workers are selected, socialized, trained, and rewarded based on individual achievement, and they consequently may not recognize a personal benefit from collaborating. In this paper we examine the individual benefits of collaboration –rather than group’s or firm’s benefits of collaboration, the focus of existing research –in a multi-method study. In Study 1, we use interview data from 65 employees across three global firms to explore why professionals who are oriented toward individual achievement choose to collaborate. In Study 2, we use longitudinal archival data on collaboration and individual performance from a fourth firm to test propositions of how professionals benefit from collaborating. We found that professionals who collaborated achieved better individual performance because they could charge a premium for cross-discipline work, and because they established a reputation that resulted in many referrals from ...