TY - JOUR A1 - Breaugh, Jessica A1 - Rackwitz, Maike A1 - Hammerschmid, Gerhard T1 - Leadership and institutional design in collaborative government digitalisation: Evidence from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, and the UK JF - Government Information Quarterly N2 - Large-scale government digitalisation projects require collaborative approaches for their successful development and implementation. To shed light on these collaboration dynamics, the interplay between two integral parts of collaborative projects: the project rules, procedures, and structures (collectively known as institutional design) and the leaders managing these projects is studied. In doing so, the paper provides empirically grounded insights into the management of collaborative government digitalisation projects. Taking an institutional perspective, and the strategic-relational approach (SRA), we examine the extent to which institutional design constraints leadership behaviours, and under what conditions leaders begin to adjust and/or challenge these design features adding to the knowledge of managing digitalisation of government. To this end, we present a five-country case study of national digitalisation projects across Europe. Our results show that while clear institutional design features such as established rules, project structures, and standard operating procedures are essential at the initial stages of the projects, leaders' skills in understanding and tailoring these features are critical to handle project-related problems and moving forwards towards implementation. This underscores the importance of examining projects taking an SRA approach and the need to understand leadership behaviour in the context of the structures in which it is embedded. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2022.101788 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Breaugh, Jessica A1 - Rackwitz, Maike A1 - Hammerschmid, Gerhard A1 - Nõmmik, Steven A1 - Bello, Benedetta A1 - Boon, Jan A1 - Van Doninck, Dries A1 - Downe, James A1 - Randma-Liiv, Tiina T1 - Deconstructing complexity: A comparative study of government collaboration in national digital platforms and smart city networks in Europe JF - Public Policy and Administration N2 - This research deconstructs complexity as a key challenge of intergovernmental digitalisation projects. While much of the literature acknowledges that the fundamental restructuring coupled with technical capacity that these joint projects require leads to increased complexity, little is known about how different types of complexity interact within the collaborative process. Using established concepts of substantive, strategic, and institutional complexity, we apply complexity theory in collaborative digital environments. To do so, eight digital projects are analysed that differ by state structure and government level. Using a cross-case design with 50 semi-structured expert interviews, we find that each digitalisation project exhibits all types of complexity and that these complexities overlap. However, clear differences emerge between national and local level projects, suggesting that complexity in digitalisation processes presents different challenges for collaborative digitalisation projects across contexts. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/09520767231169401 ER -