Public-private ties represent an increasingly prominent hybrid organizational form, yet little is known on their organisational design and performance implications.

Dr Kivleniece built on a distinction between tightly versus loosely coupled collaboration to demonstrate how exogenous environmental uncertainty impacts the choice of organisational form and collaboration duration. The results, based on water sector partnerships in developing world, suggested that hybridization in underlying organizational design allows organizational actors (firms) to address differentially market- and institutionally-based contingencies.

While low constraints in political environment are associated with loosely coupled organizational forms, high market-based volatility is linked to adoption of more tightly coupled arrangements between public and private counterparts.

Overall, this talk will demonstrate the critical impact that a broader alignment between organizational design and institutional context, rather than merely a transactional alignment, plays in the formation and longevity of public-private sector ties, particularly in the socially and politically salient water sector in the developing world.

Dr Ilze Kivleniece is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). She holds a PhD in Strategic Management from HEC Paris. In her research, Ilze Kivleniece focuses on novel, innovative organizational forms and governance models as important mechanisms of value creation and capture from both public and private actor perspectives. In her empirical work, she also studies the impact of social and political contestation on firm strategy, boundary choices and performance.