Modeling the Roles of Leadership for Inter-organizational Information Sharing and Integration Success

We expand the current understanding of leadership's influence on the success of inter-organizational information sharing and integration (IIS) by testing and proposing direct and indirect relationships using structural equation modelling (SEM). We analyzed data from a national survey of 173 professionals from IIS projects in Public Health and Criminal Justice in the US. We evaluated the direct and indirect relationships of three leadership mechanisms -- executive involvement, exercise of formal authority, and informal leaders. By testing the causal relationships between two types of leaders: bureaucratic-based executive leader and network-based informal leaders, we substantiate how embeddedness in bureaucracy influences the relationship between leadership activities and success of IIS projects. Our findings show the significant role of executive involvement to the success of IIS. We found that the influence of informal leaders is magnified by the involvement of executives. Our finding also support the importance of informal leaders both directly to the success of IIS or in curbing the potential negative impact of misuse of authority in the collaboration. Finally, we found that perceptions of participants in terms of how IIS project success is measured, influences the impact of leadership on the success of IIS projects.