By Dr Andrew Creed, Professor Ambika Zutshi, and Dr Marzena Baker
With artificial intelligence imposing new challenges for building and enhancing collaborative relationships among personnel, existence-relatedness-growth (ERG) theory is resurgent as a potential solution pathway. ERG can roadmap how teams and organizations collaboratively enhance knowledge transfer and dissemination whilst navigating competitive operational and needs-based footholds towards expeditious decision making.
Introduction: If Collaboration is So Easy…
Collaboration generally allows work to be completed effectively, efficiently, and in an accelerated manner whilst building the foundation of new (and strengthening established) relationships between individuals. Easier said than done, and it’s not always a rosy picture, instead one with tension and relationship fallout when implementation and outcomes are opposed to original expectations. When trying to support knowledge transfer and maintain operational efficiency, many things can stand in the way. Time pressure to meet deadlines and deliver results, competing departmental priorities, communication hampered by departmental silos, resource constraints, and even the “knowledge is power” mindset can create reluctance among personnel to share expertise and collaborate.
It is truly on the shoulders of others that our self-interests for growth are achieved.
Throw in cutthroat competitive corporate landscapes, office politics, plus accelerated artificial intelligence (AI) interventions to workflows, and individuals start to wonder about the benefits of attempting to collaborate, and how to make collaboration work at all, around the roadblocks that seem to beset it. It is timely to ask whether existence-relatedness-growth (ERG) theory can offer solutions to build and enhance collaborative relationships among personnel within a competitive climate.
Why ERG Now?
ERG theory has made a resurgence in understanding workplace motivation. For instance, communal (collaborative) values are now linked by research to ERG through factors including well-being, welfare, and human rights. Studies are showing that AI emulates human needs mechanisms (including ERG) within simulation models. While motivation is understood to also involve cognitive processes (like expectancies and equitable comparisons), the fact that basic human needs are foundational keeps appearing in studies.
Collaboration operates in conjunction with competition. Competition research includes the concept of foothold moves that the authors have integrated with ERG to illustrate prevailing conditions. Essentially, self-interest strongly drives the moves people make toward fulfilling their highest growth needs. As figure 1 illustrates, it is truly on the shoulders of others that our self-interests for growth are achieved. This is not a diminishment of collaboration but a realistic positioning of the collaborative mechanism being the primary platform through which individuals and teams bring about growth goals.
Existence and relatedness comprise diverse needs achieved largely by competitive foothold moves involving collaborating with others. It is only in the higher order growth needs that competitive actions emerge as the main driving forces leading to self-satisfaction. The pragmatic reality is the limited number of opportunities at the top of the competitive ladder that lead to feelings of frustration in aspirational people who fail to achieve certain specific growth goals. Further research into ERG finds support for the need strength effect, confirming that, as lower-level needs are fulfilled, there is increased intensity of higher-level needs. Furthermore, the need strength effect sometimes inverses in situations where human needs are rapidly changing, meaning that if higher-level needs are met, then the intensity of lower-level needs can increase. In practical terms, managers desire to harness personnel motivation to compete for self-interested growth gains, yet the role of collaboration as both a foundational foothold for achieving growth and a fallback for frustrated staff who cannot currently attain the limited corporate resources must be recognised and balanced.
Getting Real with Recommendations
Recommendations of ERG theory for collaboration and its relationship to competitive foothold moves sparks practical insights. There is a potential roadmap of how teams and organizations can collaboratively enhance knowledge transfer and dissemination whilst navigating competitive operational and needs-based roadblocks around expeditious decision making.
Collaboration becomes a strategic tool for establishing stronger competitive footholds at all levels.
When viewed through the ERG lens, competitive footholds in collaborative environments can counterintuitively create opportunities and overcome obstacles. For instance, departmental silos that continue to be a focus of many organisational interventions emerge when teams prioritize unit-specific competitive positions over organizational level collaboration and alignment (existence needs). Rather than viewing this as problematic, organizations can leverage competitive instincts by creating cross-functional “value networks” where departments strengthen their organizational foothold through collaborative achievements. For example, shared KPIs that reward cross-departmental innovation could transform collaboration into a competitive advantage. They can change what could be a competitive situation (e.g., R&D focusing solely on technical excellence while marketing push for quick-to-market features) into a collaborative advantage where both departments achieve better results together than they would separately. Such “value networks” could make collaboration a strategic choice rather than an optional activity.
Similarly, time pressures and competing priorities can become opportunities to establish “collaborative ecosystems” where cross-departmental projects enhance unit standing, individual growth needs, and the company’s efficiency, agility, and competitive positioning. These ecosystems can operate as shared project spaces where departments pool resources and expertise to tackle complex challenges much more efficiently. For example, when marketing and product development teams collaborate early in the innovation process, they reduce overall project timelines while developing more market-ready and competitively differentiated solutions. This satisfies both the need for operational efficiency (existence) and the need for strategic influence (growth). The cross-departmental teams can gain enhanced visibility and resource access through collaborative leadership.
Organizations know that success comes from aligning collaborative initiatives with both organizational goals and individual priorities. Creating structured programs where cross-team and cross-department knowledge-sharing directly enhances their influence (relatedness), while building individual expertise (growth) can transform traditional competitive barriers into networks of opportunities. In such situations, collaboration becomes a strategic tool for establishing stronger competitive footholds at all levels. For example, collaboration between manufacturing, supply chain, and production departments may result in a new manufacturing process that is not only more sustainable but also more cost-effective and easier to implement across multiple operations. Other collaborative opportunities are endless.
