Modeling Collective Action in POM: The Strategy-Operations-People Framework (Revision 2 )

While many business situations relevant to Production and Operations Management (POM), such as supply chain coordination or sustainable operations, involve some form of collective action, managerial frameworks for collective action rarely appear in POM contexts. Valuable insights may thus be missed, reducing the effectiveness and implementability of proposed POM solutions. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a framework for collective action that has its roots in the organizational behavior literature. The authors formalize it mathematically not only to offer definitional clarity, but also to relate it to common POM modeling approaches. They then illustrate its relevance to POM by mapping it to case studies in supply chain coordination and sustainable operations. The proposed framework, named the Strategy-Operations-People (SOP) framework, is structured in three levels, comprising three, two, and one elements, respectively. First, the Strategy level induces and enforces solidarity among all team members by specifying common goals, shared values, and well-defined rules. Second, the Operations level organizes the decentralized execution of collective action in autonomous subgroups through a detailed specification of roles and processes. Third, the People level requires the individual commitment of all team members to the proposed collective action program, since a team’s performance rests on the individual contributions of its members. The framework thus addresses the common, subgroup, and individual dimensions of collective action. The SOP framework also contributes to the broader fields of team leadership and organizational behavior in two ways. First, its mathematical formalization brings operational clarity on the defining scope of the framework’s elements. Second, mapping the framework to two problems in supply chain management and sustainable operations illustrates its broad applicability, moving beyond collective action within organizations, to guide collective action taking place across organizations.