Oral Presentation by Nora Thorsteinsen Toft¹, Mari Svendsen¹
¹ Kristiania University of Applied Science, Norway
TIME: Thursday, 16 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 3
Session: 23
Abstract
Inter-organizational relationships (IORs) are essential in addressing complex societal challenges, yet assessments of collaboration often privilege productive outcomes and obscure the “dark side” of joint work. Such narrow evaluations are reinforced by neoliberal standards emphasizing efficiency and cost effectiveness, which can produce “hollow victories” and mask systemic sources of failure and individual strain (Bal & Dóci, 2018; Clegg et al., 2002; Evans et al., 2005). While IOR research has examined macro-level issues such as conflict and opportunism, it has paid limited attention to the micro-level processes through which these dynamics are interpreted, enacted, and experienced by individuals. Building on Cloutier and Langley’s (2020) process theorization principles and informed by illustrative examples from empirical work on non-profit collaboration, this article links macro-level structures with micro-level lived experience to investigate the following research question: What affects individuals’ experience of agency when encountering dark sides of non-profit IORs? The article presents a process-based conceptual model explaining how the “dark side” of non-profit IORs unfolds at the micro level. Drawing on critical organizational psychology (Bal et al., 2019; Islam & Sanderson, 2022) and Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986, 1989), the model shows how personal factors, behaviors, and environmental events interact recursively with system-level pressures. Through this interplay, individuals may become disempowered, emotionally burdened, cynical, or morally distressed, - experiences that emerge dynamically rather than as fixed outcomes. Adopting a critical meta-theoretical stance, the paper challenges assumptions embedded in dominant IOR research and highlights how neoliberal ideologies can obscure harmful individual consequences, especially when contributions are evaluated by “wrong tokens” (Vamstad, 2025). In line with critical organizational psychology’s emancipatory aims (Abrams et al., 2023), the paper advances a more human-centered understanding of collaborative dynamics and lays groundwork for future empirical research and interventions to strengthen individual agency within non-profit IORs.