THE CRISIS AS A FACILITATOR OF INTRA- AND INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL COLLABORATION: THE CASE OF COVID 19

Abstract

<strong>Summary</strong> The COVID-19 health crisis has shaken up the organization and operation of hospitals, a context that had already been under strain for several years, dealing with exhausted and sometimes even revolted healthcare professionals (Michot et al., 2019). Faced with the scale of the human challenge provoked by this crisis, the need to develop multi-professional teamwork to improve the efficiency of care and the agility of organizations has emerged as a major issue (Minvielle 2018 a, b). We pose the following research question: how has the health crisis fostered intra- and inter-organizational collaborations? In this paper, we will attempt to account for this relatively paradoxical situation by drawing on work carried out with professionals. In the first part, we show that the management science literature has produced useful resources for understanding the obstacles to collaborative work, notably based on the work of Carlile (2002, 2004) on the concepts of knowledge boundaries. We then present our methodology, based on several case studies. The results presented in the third section relate to the notions of boundary objects and boundary crossers. They are discussed in a final section devoted to the contributions of this research.