Modeling Collective Action in POM: The Strategy-Operations-People (S3O2P1) Framework

Business situations relevant to Production and Operations Management (POM), such as supply chain coordination or sustainable operations, typically involve some form of collective action. While many models have been developed by POM researchers and practitioners to capture and improve these business situations, implementing them can reveal challenging, especially when POM modelers or managers fail to account for all the elements that induce or impede collective action, consider them in the wrong sequence, or are unable to sufficiently align them. In this paper, the authors present a framework for collective action, the S3O2P1 framework, and argue its relevance to POM. The framework consists of three levels, each consisting, respectively, of three, two and one elements that need to be aligned to result in effective collective action. First, at the Strategy level, collaboration requires shared goals, shared values, and well-defined rules to be accepted and practiced by all. These induce and enforce solidarity among the group’s members. Second, at the Operations level, collaboration is organized in subgroups, requiring the specification of roles and processes. This level decentralizes collective action into its components. Third, at the People level, individual team members need to commit to the proposed scheme/model of collective action, both at the strategic and operational levels, since the team performance rests on the contributions of its individual members. The authors first apply the framework to supply chain coordination and sustainable operations and then map it to the contexts of mathematical optimization and game theory. This allows them to identify the elements of the framework that may be overlooked by a given stream of research or method. The framework thus identifies challenges to the successful implementation and full relevance of POM models in contexts of collective action.