The Tethered Pathway to Organizational Adaptation in Collaboration

Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine how the framework of administrative tethering (AT) provides important guidance and insight at the organizational level to support a strategic management mechanism to ameliorate pressing political, social, and economic issues for the public good. This investigation was an empirical analysis of data collected from the 2020 Federal Employee Viewpoint (FEV) Survey and records attributed to the Department of the Navy (N = 32,416). The Department of the Navy consists of naval forces and marine forces for maritime operations, which conduct internal collaboration and represent cases of both external institution to institution (i2i) collaboration and internal unit to unit (u2u) collaboration. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a useful analytical approach to examine the relationships among all the measured and latent variables. The resulting SEM analysis evoked the importance of individual behaviors on collaborative efforts.