Assessment of the willingness to collaborate in enterprise networks

Abstract

The success of a partnership depends fundamentally on the partners' active and vigorous participation in the achievement of the common goals. The commitment to these goals is associated to each partner's attitudes and intentions. These intentions, in turn, are linked to the partner's beliefs concerning the expected outcomes of a collaboration opportunity. This work proposes an approach to assess organizations' willingness to collaborate. This approach follows a behavioral perspective, which is based on the Theory of the Planned Behavior. A tool named Intentions Query Mechanism selects a number of appropriate questions from a knowledge-base, from which the answers allow to estimate the level of an organization's willingness to collaborate. © 2010 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.