To Continue or not to Continue? Drivers of Recurrent Partnering in Temporary Organizations

Abstract

While research has provided ample evidence that temporal (dis-)continuity in partnering is highly consequential for the governance and performance outcomes of temporary organizations, we know much less about the conditions that drive the members of temporary organizations to engage in recurrent partnering. Focusing on project organizations, the present research offers theoretical arguments and related empirical evidence that illuminate when and why project-leading organizations expect to continue collaboration with the same project partner in future projects. Specifically, we show that expectations of recurrent collaboration are a function of backward-looking experiential learning and forward-looking opportunity cost assessments. Our findings contribute to better understanding of temporality in temporary organizations by uncovering a set of factors conducive to explaining when and why the same partners engage in temporary sequences of projects.