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This study aimed to investigate the underlying boundary conditions under which boundary-spanning behaviour has a positive or negative effect on innovative behaviour.

A multi-wave and multi-source research design was adopted to collect data. Data were analysed using the multilevel structural equation modelling and latent moderated structural equation approach.

The results showed that boundary-spanning behaviour was significantly and negatively associated with employees' innovative behaviour via ego depletion when employees' intrinsic motivation or organisational support was low. Additionally, boundary-spanning behaviour was significantly and positively associated with employees' innovative behaviour via ego depletion when employees' intrinsic motivation or organisational support was high.

This research suggests that the consequences of boundary-spanning behaviour are conditional, explaining the contrasting conclusions in this regard.

The purpose of this research is to examine the positive relationship between leader's boundary-spanning behavior and employee creative behavior. Moreover, the research investigates a three-way effect by exploring leader's boundary-spanning behavior, need for status and creative self-efficacy on employee creative behavior.

The authors conducted a cross-sectional survey involving 260 supervisor-subordinate dyads from various companies in South Korea. The research tests the hypotheses through a hierarchical regression analysis.

The authors provided empirical evidence that leader's boundary-spanning behavior positively related to employee creative behavior. Moreover, the result demonstrated that the effect of leader's boundary-spanning behavior on creative behavior was the strongest in the context of high need for status and high creative self-efficacy.

The research contributes to the three streams of literature on boundary spanning, creativity, and leadership by exploring leaders' boundary-spanning behavior, employees' need for status, and employees' creative self-efficacy.

The findings suggest that organizations should promote leaders' boundary-spanning behavior, thereby enhancing employees' creative behavior. Also, the study highlights the critical role of individual factors, such as the need for status and creative self-efficacy, and situational factors that determine the level of creative behavior.

Integrating the componential model of creativity and the interactionist perspective of creativity, this research examines the positive influence of leaders' boundary-spanning behavior on creative behavior. Furthermore, the research exhibits how leader's boundary-spanning behavior, need for status and creative self-efficacy could develop creative conditions to promote employee creative behavior.

This paper examined the mediating role of boundary spanning behavior and the moderating effects of traditionality linking humble leadership and employee creative performance from the perspective of Social Exchange Theory (SET) to reveal the behavioral mechanism and boundary condition regarding the influence of humble leadership on creative performance.

A sample of 276 employees and the supervisors from 8 companies in China was taken using two-wave data.

The results indicated that humble leadership was positively related to employee creative performance, and boundary spanning behavior partially mediated the relationship between humble leadership and employee creative performance. Traditionality strengthens the mediation process when traditionality is high.

These findings provide several theoretical and practical implications for the domains of humble leadership and boundary spanning behavior. For example, human resource (HR) departments can recruit leaders with high humility and cultivate team leaders through systematic training programs about self-awareness, openness and self-transcendence; team leaders should encourage employees to participate in boundary spanning activities and hiring managers select employees with high traditionality to synergize with leader humility.

Based on the SET, this paper explored the behavioral mechanism between humble leadership and creative performance and enriched the prior research, which is from the cognitive or emotional view, and further answered the question “what are the employees' behavioral responses when they confront the humble leadership”.

This study aims to investigate the antecedents of frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors in the hospitality industry. Anchored in transactional stress theory, affective events theory and motivation theories, a conceptual model was built to explore the impacts of hindrance stressors on boundary-spanning behavior.

Data were collected from frontline employees in the hospitality industry in the USA. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used.

The findings revealed that despite hindrance stressors’ negative indirect impact on frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors, intrinsic motivation worked effectively to reduce hindrance stress and influence subsequent emotions leading to boundary-spanning behaviors.

This study provides substantial and detailed strategies for hospitality practitioners who are pressed to alleviate the hindrance stressors from which frontline employees frequently suffer, foster employees’ positive emotions and ease negative emotions while promoting boundary-spanning behaviors. Cultivation of employees’ intrinsic motivation and emotional management is encouraged, as is effective organizational structure and management intervention. All of these are deemed helpful in buffering employees’ work-related stress while motivating them to go above and beyond their nominal duties.

Very few studies have examined how “bad” hindrance stressors affect boundary-spanning behaviors. Rather than suggesting that hindrance stressors are relevant only to counterproductive behaviors, this study extends both the stress and boundary-spanning literature by uncovering the impact of hindrance stressors on frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors while accounting for the roles of workers’ motivation and emotion.

Scholars typically view cross-legacy boundary spanners – employees who develop and maintain social relationships with coworkers from both legacy organizations – as the key integrators in mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Organizations even formally appoint employees with cross-legacy responsibilities to support the post-merger integration process. Recent research has started to emphasize, however, how difficult it can be to reap the benefits of a boundary-spanning position. Building and maintaining formal or informal boundary-spanning ties is costly because it requires time, attention, and political savviness. To better understand the perks and pitfalls of cross-legacy boundary-spanning, the authors identify and describe its structural and sociocultural dimensions and explain how they influence cross-legacy boundary-spanning in M&A contexts. The authors argue that the two dimensions can be seen as boundary conditions to the positive relationship between cross-legacy boundary spanning and post-merger integration. This chapter highlights the potential dark side of cross-legacy boundary-spanning and proposes a multi-dimensional model to explain how cross-legacy boundary spanners can avoid the pitfalls and promote the perks of their position in support of successful post-merger integration.

This study aims to investigate the effect of social undermining on the service employees' boundary-spanning behavior though perceived fit with job (P-J fit). This study also aims to examine the moderating role of ethical climate in the relationship between service employees' perceived fit with job (P-J fit) and boundary-spanning behavior.

Using a sample of 469 Korean bank and insurance employees, research model and hypotheses were tested. Data analysis was performed using structural equation modeling and the hierarchical regression model.

The results showed that supervisor and co-worker undermining have detrimental influences on the service employee's perceived fit with job. P-J fit has a positive effect on employees' boundary-spanning behavior and this relationship was positively moderated by the employee's prevailing perception of organizational practices and procedures that have ethical content.

This research should be evaluated in light of limitations, one of which is the reliance on cross-sectional data. The generalizability of this research model across settings and across outcome variables is still an open question. The measures of social undermining were based on participant perceptions, and in each case, participants make judgments about their negative behaviors retrospectively. Furthermore, the data were collected in Korea, so generalizing the hypothesized model beyond this setting is limited. Since Korea represents a distinct cultural and economic context, future research could examine the model in different countries.

The findings of this study confirm the crucial role of managers in creating an ethical climate where decisions are based on formally stated ethical guidelines. Such guidelines help service employees solve the ethical dilemmas that are common to their positions. These research findings demonstrate that creating an ethical climate is not only the right thing to do but also has significant benefits for both the service employees and the organization.

Considering the boundary-spanning role of the service employee, not only the organizational side (supervisor and co-worker undermining), but also the customer is specified as a major source of social undermining.

To obtain optimal deliverables, more and more crowdsourcing platforms allow contest teams to submit tentative solutions and update scores/rankings on public leaderboards. Such feedback-seeking behavior for progress benchmarking pertains to the team representation activity of boundary spanning. The literature on virtual team performance primarily focuses on team characteristics, among which network closure is generally considered a positive factor. This study further examines how boundary spanning helps mitigate the negative impact of network closure.

This study collected data of 9,793 teams in 246 contests from Kaggle.com. Negative binomial regression modeling and linear regression modeling are employed to investigate the relationships among network closure, boundary spanning and team performance in crowdsourcing contests.

Whereas network closure turns out to be a negative asset for virtual teams to seek platform feedback, boundary spanning mitigates its impact on team performance. On top of such a partial mediation, boundary spanning experience and previous contest performance serve as potential moderators.

The findings offer helpful implications for researchers and practitioners on how to break network closure and encourage boundary spanning with the establishment of facilitating structures in crowdsourcing contests.

The study advances the understanding of theoretical relationships among network closure, boundary spanning and team performance in crowdsourcing contests.

To better understand factors that lead to business model innovation (BMI) in organizations, this study argues that inclusive leadership is the primary source that motivates employee engagement in boundary-spanning activities, which fosters BMI by generating and integrating employee knowledge through boundary-spanning exploration.

This paper analyzes the relationships between inclusive leadership, boundary-spanning exploration and BMI to discover how they influence each other. This is achieved by a survey of more than 30 enterprises in Zhejiang Province, China. The survey data are analyzed using SPSS.

Inclusive leaders who display characteristics of openness, accessibility and availability have a positive effect on BMI and boundary-spanning exploration; openness and accessibility have more significant positive effect on BMI and boundary-spanning exploration.

Because this study covers only in Zhejiang Province, in China, the findings may not be easily generalizable to other contexts. Other factors, such as organizational structure and contextual characteristics, could also be added as antecedents in a future investigation. Moreover, the scales could be revised more suitable for China in the future.

The empirical findings can be used as guidelines for firms seeking to take advantage of inclusive leadership and to help firms motivate their employees to engage in boundary-spanning exploration to acquire, generate and integrate knowledge from diverse sources to promote BMI.

This study provides insights that will be of value by adding to the theoretical foundation of our understanding of the antecedents to firms' BMI. This study argues that employees' boundary-spanning exploration is important to BMI as well. Inclusive leadership is crucial to stimulate boundary-spanning exploration by employees. Therefore, how to encourage inclusive leadership in firms is well worth examining.

This paper aims to draw upon motivated information processing theory to examine the sequential mediating roles of perspective taking and boundary spanning between transformational leadership and the creative performance of knowledge workers.

The study was carried out on a sample, including a dyad of 398 knowledge workers and their immediate supervisors in four research institutes in southwest China. The authors tested the theoretical model using structural equation modeling (SEM) and Mplus 7.0 software.

The results support the mediation model in which perspective taking was found to significantly and positively mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and boundary spanning. Boundary spanning was found to significantly and positively mediate the relationship between perspective taking and creative performance. Moreover, both perspective taking and boundary spanning were found to mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and creative performance.

The study findings imply that the transformational leadership behaviors of managers or supervisors nurture knowledge workers' perspective taking and their boundary spanning activities leading to creative performance.

The findings contribute new knowledge to the relationship between transformational leadership and creative performance by uncovering the causal chain of a cognitive mechanism (perspective taking) with a behavioral mechanism (boundary spanning).

The current article investigates the impact of generational diversity on knowledge sharing and group performance. It, further, explores the moderating effects of intergenerational climate, boundary-spanning leadership, and respect in facilitating greater knowledge sharing and enhanced group performance.

The authors applied partial least square structural equation modeling to test the model, using a sample of 635 employees working in the banking industry.

Results indicate that generational diversity negatively influences knowledge sharing among employees at work. However, the moderating roles of intergenerational climate and boundary-spanning leadership aid in mitigating this negative affect and facilitate knowledge sharing among employees, thereby, resulting in better group performance.

The study extends extant literature on generational diversity and differences by examining its impact on knowledge sharing and group performance. Further, the study also contributes by highlighting intergenerational climate and boundary-spanning leadership as key facilitators in promoting knowledge sharing among employees. Future research may include other industries/contexts to widen the generalizability of the findings and a longitudinal design to ascertain the causal effects.

This study identifies the need to effectively manage multigenerational workforce to capitalize on the unique benefits of each generation. An intergenerational climate free from ageist attitudes and employing leaders possessing boundary-spanning abilities would help organizations to create an inclusive workplace.

The authors attempt to explore the relationship between generational diversity, knowledge sharing, and group performance through the moderating effects of intergenerational climate and boundary-spanning leadership, which has not been studied in the past.