The last few decades, the perception that organizations have about several types of boundaries ‘blurred’: with shared services and outsourcing companies started looking differently at both internal and external organizational boundaries. With offshoring even geographical boundaries became less of a given limitation for organizations. However, one boundary stayed more or less the same: the mental boundary of managers that are responsible for activities that are located outside their organization. In my opinion, still too often, these kind of so called interorganizational relationships (IORs) are being managed in an unproductive way, based on old beliefs and experiences that worked before the time that organizational boundaries were as ‘blurred’ as they are today. Therefore it is time for a shift in the mind of practitioners.When studying existing literature on governance modes, and especially on IORs, it appears that not only practitioners need to reassess their assumptions. Also a lot of researchers could use a wider view on relationships across the boundaries of organizations. In the scientific debate on this topic, researchers appear to have focused more on the way negative behavior can be prevented and controlled, than on ways to stimulate positive behavior by coordination and creating clarity. Furthermore, the focus of scientific contributions so far has been in particular on the cost of cooperation, instead of using a balanced approach that also takes the value creating effect of cooperation into account. Therefore, in my opinion, also theory on this subject could use a shift in focus.This paper is part of a PhD research that aims to contribute to these required shifts in focus in both theory and practice of IORs by creating new insights in the impact of formal control mechanisms on the performance of IORs. In this analysis, attention is being paid to the role of behavior as mediating variable between formal control and performance. In this paper, that is part of the explanatory research phase, the choices that have been made so far regarding the research design are explained. The main objective of this paper is to start a discussion and to gather feedback from fellow researchers.