Decoding Blame and Accountability in Hierarchical Cross-Sector Collaborations

Cross-sector collaboration is widely recognized as a crucial strategy for addressing complex societal challenges. However, how are blame and accountability distributed across different hierarchical levels when service failures occur? Our research, which includes a nationally representative survey experiment and an online ethnographic study, shows that citizens tend to assign blame and accountability to the higher levels of the collaborative system rather than just the front-line sector directly involved in the failure. Additionally, we find that clearly defining the roles of each sector in this vertical hierarchy does not mitigate misattributions caused by perceptual biases and the prevailing negative sentiment towards international NGOs, exacerbated by the recent tensions between China and the Western world. Our study contributes to the propositions on collaborative arrangements (Hood, 2010; p. 82, p. 94) by decoding the patterns and directions of blame and accountability attribution in two different types of service failures: operational (e.g. login errors) and ethical (e.g., personal information leakage). We also integrate the sector bias proposition from public administration with the perceptual loop theory from psychology (Hartsuiker, R. J., & Kolk, H., 2001) that better explains the subgroup heterogeneity behind the main difference across groups. Furthermore, we take an additional step to explore the psychological mechanisms behind our experimental results by conducting content analysis on a long panel dataset (spanning over 13 years and consisting of over 30,000 posts) gathered from an online ethnographic study.

The experiment received ethical approval from the Human Subjects Ethics Sub-committee at CityU HK. Before data collection, it was pre-registered with Registration ID: 194530 at AsPredicted.org.