Networks are an increasingly common aspect of administrative life in almost any policy arena. In 1999 the health care industry created the National Quality Forum, a network administrative organization, whose founding mission was to improve American healthcare through endorsement of consensus-based national standards for measurement and public reporting of healthcare performance data that provide meaningful information about whether care is safe, timely, beneficial, patient-centered, equitable and efficient. The NQF is representative of a network administrative organization because it was created to address issues of health care quality in a new way by bringing together organizations from the public and private sectors and providing them with a forum to discuss and debate measures of quality, and ultimately, to effect change. The NQF thus represents a major administrative experiment in addressing health policy issues. In spite of the popularity of networks, little is known about a network manager's or, more appropriately for this dissertation, a network entrepreneur's critical tasks in creating a network administrative organization. The purpose of this dissertation is to present the results of an empirical study of the critical leadership tasks of the NQF's President and CEO during the NQF's formative stages. This dissertation identifies and conceptualizes three critical leadership tasks of the NQF's President and CEO: defining the NQF's mission, building and maintaining the NQF's social base, and creating the NQF's Consensus Development Process. In addition, this dissertation proposes a series of testable hypothesis based on these three critical tasks that can be used for exploring leadership in other NAOs. The findings indicate that leadership is crucial to the formation of a network administrative organization and fills a gap in our understanding of network management by developing the concept of network leadership and exploring the critical tasks a leader undertakes during the formative stages of building an NAO like the NQF. / Ph. D.

Objective: To understand the use of evidence-informed decision-making within an interorganizational network, and identify the facilitators and barriers to achieving network goals. Design: Case study. Setting: Rural health district in Nova Scotia, Canada (2006 to 2011). Participants: Members from 4 organizations representing community and hospital groups participating in a regional Baby Friendly Initiative network. Methods: A descriptive mixed methods study using focus group and questionnaire methodology. Data were analyzed using framework analysis and social network analysis (SNA). Results: The SNA results highlighted the role that relationships have on the sharing of knowledge among network members. The findings highlight the need for leadership at multiple levels (community, network members, primary organizations, and the provincial government). A lack of resources to achieve the network’s goals was a key barrier. Conclusions: The role of multi-level leadership is important for future network development and community consideration. The case study methodology facilitated momentum towards the network’s goals.

Objective: To understand the use of evidence-informed decision-making within an interorganizational network, and identify the facilitators and barriers to achieving network goals. Design: Case study. Setting: Rural health district in Nova Scotia, Canada (2006 to 2011). Participants: Members from 4 organizations representing community and hospital groups participating in a regional Baby Friendly Initiative network. Methods: A descriptive mixed methods study using focus group and questionnaire methodology. Data were analyzed using framework analysis and social network analysis (SNA). Results: The SNA results highlighted the role that relationships have on the sharing of knowledge among network members. The findings highlight the need for leadership at multiple levels (community, network members, primary organizations, and the provincial government). A lack of resources to achieve the network’s goals was a key barrier. Conclusions: The role of multi-level leadership is important for future network development and community consideration. The case study methodology facilitated momentum towards the network’s goals.

The fight against terrorism and organized crime require strong collaboration between public security organizations. Public security networks include several agencies that are not bound to each other with strong hierarchical ties. Because of a lack of the strong hierarchical structure, managing public networks is not similar to managing a single government agency. This study aims to examine the factors influencing network effectiveness in the public security sector. The main research questions of the study are: Which factors are important for effectiveness in public security networks? What is the role of inter-organizational trust among partner agencies? Which kind of leadership style will achieve the highest performance in public security networks? What is the relative importance of goal convergence and organizational culture in network effectiveness? How does the relationship between inter-organizational trust, leadership style, goal convergence and organizational culture impact network effectiveness? In order to find these relations, a self-reported survey was sent to 2,095 current and previous Turkish public security network managers. The study found that inter-organizational trust and goal convergence have a positive relationship with network effectiveness. Although facilitator leadership is found to be the most common leadership style in Turkish public security networks, it is found as inappropriate to achieve higher network effectiveness. According to the results, the co-producer network leadership is the most convenient leadership style in terms of network effectiveness. While the results of the descriptive statistics confirm that six specific features of organizational culture in public security sector have negative influence on network effectiveness, the hypothesis testing with the covariance structure model only support the negative impact of competition among partner organization. This study contributes to the literature on network effectiveness with particular proposals for the public security managers and practitioners.