Managing tribal communities to foster collaboration : opportunities and threats.

An organization is an environment for a multitude of interactions between stakeholders—employees, customers, managers. This network of interactions involves frictions, barriers and pressures. One of the core purposes of an organization should be fostering its interactions—fostering collaboration among stakeholders. The most common way to foster collaboration seems to be by managing work teams, a century-old approach that is embedded in an economic rationality with perspectives around efficiency and objective work. This approach seems to be more and more outdated. An emerging way to foster collaboration seems to be by managing work communities, a younger approach that is embedded in an anthropological rationality with perspectives around people and collective work. Managing tribal communities to foster collaboration : opportunities and threats. In 2019, five percent of the so-called "agile" organizations had implemented the Spotify Model (VersionOne, 2019). Such is the case of ING Belgium which, in 2018, distributed its two thousand employees in tribes and squads. The Spotify Model offers the promise of fostering collaboration by managing tribal communities (Kniberg, 2014). However, to date, no scientific research has been carried out on this matter. In this master thesis, collaboration is defined as the process of working together for achieving a co-defined mission based on formal and informal agreements, on participative decision-making and a strong alignment and autonomy on the part of stakeholders (De Ridder et al., 2018). Tribal communities are defined as work communities that gathers employees around a tribal culture and a tribal leader. A tribal culture is the articulation of the tribal myth (its duality, beliefs, legendary heroes), the dichotomy of things (sacred vs. profane) and the tribal cult (space time and ceremonies).