@phdthesis{Dieterle2025, author = {Dieterle, Ann-Kathrin}, title = {The role of inter-organizational cooperation for resilience : an analysis of organizational processes, strategies, practices, and sources}, doi = {10.26127/BTUOpen-7157}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:co1-opus4-71571}, school = {BTU Cottbus - Senftenberg}, year = {2025}, abstract = {This dissertation examines the influences of inter-organizational cooperation on resilience and its implementation. Recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war have underscored the importance of organizational resilience. Yet there is still a need in organizational resilience research for multifaceted and empirical studies on the relationships between the resilience process, resilience capabilities and resources, other related sources of resilience, and the various resilience outcomes. In particular, research on the proactive phase of the resilience process - also known as strategic resilience - is still in its early stages. Inter-organizational cooperation, which spans multiple levels of analysis, offers a promising approach to filling these gaps, even though its role for resilience remains underexplored. Furthermore, from a practical perspective, it is known that firms form alliances in times of crisis as well as innovation-related partnerships during renewal processes. To address these issues and to provide a holistic and interdisciplinary approach for explaining the building and implementation of resilience, this thesis employed both theoretical and practical methods within its research design. It begins with a narrative literature review that conceptualizes inter-organizational resilience as outlined in the first publication, drawing on interdisciplinary scientific scholars. This is followed by a desk research method in the second publication, to deepen the understanding and practical relevance of aforementioned conceptualizations. Furthermore, this thesis examined the subject through case studies, including 22 in-depth narrative interviews and various secondary data sources, with two different foci in the third and fourth publications. The findings contribute to resilience research by developing a conceptual multi-level resilience framework that illustrates the dynamics of inter-organizational cooperation across the phases of anticipation, coping, and adaptation, highlighting the importance of capabilities and resources as key resilience sources. Second, it identifies interorganizational cooperation as a crucial strategy during crises, highlighting specific outcome trajectories. Third, it links proactive resilience to a holistic innovation strategy mix, showing how inter-organizational diversity, intra-organizational participation, and integrative learning processes contribute to building proactive resilience resources and capabilities. Fourth, the thesis demonstrates how cooperation projects between established firms and start-ups are implemented as practical measures to enhance proactive resilience, emphasizing the critical role of relationship quality. Collectively, these contributions provided insights into how inter-organizational cooperation strengthens resilience processes, capabilities, and resources, offering strategies and practices for achieving resilience outcomes.}, subject = {Organizational resilience; Inter-organizational cooperation; Resilience capabilities; Innovation strategy; Organisationale Resilienz; Organisations{\"u}bergreifende Zusammenarbeit; Resilienzf{\"a}higkeiten; Innovationsstrategie; Organisationsentwicklung; Resilienz; Kooperation; Innovation}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Gliem2022, author = {Gliem, Silvia}, title = {Shaping the customer-provider relationship in service : frontline employees as key drivers for the improvement of service productivity}, doi = {10.26127/BTUOpen-6306}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:co1-opus4-63067}, school = {BTU Cottbus - Senftenberg}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Between 2000 and 2015, the services sector grew by 23\% in OECD countries, with around two-thirds of the working population employed in this sector. In the European Union, 72.1\% of the labor force worked in the services sector in 2018. With a growing global population, the demand for services is also increasing, making increasing service productivity an important research goal. Public and private service companies are subject to different incentive structures that influence their approach to productivity. Public service enterprises, especially in the social, health, and education sectors, play a critical role in society. Improving public service productivity is therefore essential. Two research questions are addressed: What factors have the greatest impact on the performance of service workers? How can performance improvement be expressed by managing the influencing factors of frontline employees? By focusing on frontline employees, this dissertation recognizes their essential role in increasing service productivity. The goal of the thesis is to gain insight into the factors that influence their productivity in public service. The dissertation reviews service productivity models in detail. Differences and connections between the various models and schools of models are discussed. Gr{\"o}nroos and Ojasalo's model of service productivity is selected as the theoretical framework for the empirical study to examine the factors influencing frontline employees. The systematic selection of influencing factors as well as the evaluation of previous research on these factors, reveals research gaps, which are translated into hypotheses. The majority of the data for the empirical part comes from public service companies. The designed questionnaire serves as a starting point for the development of a scale for empirical validation for one part, a component of the Gr{\"o}nroos-Ojasalo model. The research results offer a basis for action for practitioners who want to achieve productivity improvements.}, subject = {Service productivity; Frontline employee; Service quality; Service productivity model; Dienstleistungsproduktivit{\"a}t; Kundenkontaktmitarbeiter; Dienstleistungsqualit{\"a}t; {\"O}ffentliche Dienstleistung; Produktivit{\"a}t; Qualit{\"a}t; Angestellter; Kunde}, language = {en} }