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The purpose of this paper is an examination of the literature on team boundary activity to trace how team boundary activity has evolved as a construct and examine the dimensions of team boundary activity and their relationships. It highlights the need for a deeper examination of the dimensions of buffering and reinforcement, and why buffering and reinforcement are required. It presents the case of why it is important to study this topic and maps out areas for future research.

The paper reviews conceptual and empirical papers published on team boundary activity in reputed journals between the years 1984 and 2016.

The focus of research in team boundary activity has been on external interactions of the team (boundary spanning), and very few papers have studied the activities through which the team defines and defends its borders (boundary strengthening). These boundary-strengthening activities can be equally important for innovation and learning in externally dependent teams. Further, there is a need to clearly distinguish these constructs from other variables like team identification. Another area that has here-to not been researched is the relationships between the dimensions of team boundary activity. Last, there is a need to consider a wider range of antecedents, outcomes and moderators of team boundary activity.

This paper is based on past empirical and conceptual papers, identified using search terms such as team boundary activity, team boundary spanning and external communication. Other related areas can also be explored for identifying variables of interest.

As opposed to previous reviews which focused mainly on team boundary spanning, this paper considers all dimensions of team boundary activity, with special focus on buffering and reinforcement. It proposes a 2 × 2 framework to explain the effect of boundary-spanning and boundary-strengthening activities on the achievement of team objectives. It examines the cyclical nature of relationship between team boundary activity and team performance. It highlights measurement issues in the area of team boundary activity.

Two challenges faced by automotive component design projects within contracted design agencies are (1) specification changes requested by the manufacturers and (2) product information or core technology knowledge leakage to external actors. We examine the effects of targeted boundary activities that address these challenges under the contingencies of environmental uncertainty and project complexity.

Based on Boundary management theory, a bidirectional model of boundary buffering was conceptualized in the context of design agency teams developing automotive components. A survey is derived from the proposed model. Regression analysis is performed using empirical data from 234 auto component design projects in Chinese design agencies.

Boundary buffering activities that strengthen outside-in boundaries and inside-out boundaries directly improve the final design quality. Further, the magnitude of effect for outside-in buffering on design quality is enhanced under environmental uncertainty, while the impact of inside-out buffering on design quality is enhanced under project complexity.

Boundary activities should consider differences in boundary targets, directional flow of information, and context of scope.

Automotive component design agents should attend to both outside-in and inside-out boundary buffering, especially under conditions of environmental uncertainty or project complexity.

The proposed bidirectional view on boundary buffering adds perspective to team boundary management theory. Specific contingencies include common risk elements of project complexity and environmental uncertainty not typically associated with the need for buffering activities.

There has been an increasing trend toward the creation of senior management teams (SMTs) which are characterized by a high degree of functional heterogeneity. Although such teams may create better linkages to information, along with the benefits of functional heterogeneity comes the potential for conflicts that stem from the value differences among subcultures in an organization. These conflicts can adversely affect performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine how school leaders’ activities mediate the relationship of SMT functional heterogeneity to SMT effectiveness (in-role performance and innovation).

Data, which were obtained through a survey, was collected from a sample of 92 schools in Israel. Data were collected from two sources (principals and SMT members) to minimize problems associated with same source and common method bias. Data were aggregated at the team level of analysis.

The results of structural equation model indicated that principal’s internal activities enhanced SMT in-role performance whereas principals’ external activities enhanced SMT innovation. The results also showed that principal’s internal activities are full mediators of the relationship between functional heterogeneity and SMT in-role performance.

This study has implications for policies involving the design and implementation of leadership tools to effectively manage SMTs. The results of this study can help principals to establish priorities and allocate their time and resources more effectively, both inward and outward the SMT boundary so as to assist functionally heterogeneous SMTs translating the benefits of functional heterogeneity into significant achievements.

As teams are built around specialized and different knowledge, they need to regulate their knowledge boundaries to exchange their specialized knowledge with other teams and to protect the value of such specialized knowledge. However, prior studies focus primarily on boundary spanning and imply that boundaries are obstacles to sharing knowledge. To fill this research gap, this study aims to indicate the importance of knowledge protection regulation, an activity that sets an adequate boundary for protecting knowledge, and investigate the factors that facilitate knowledge protection regulation and its consequences.

This study collected empirical data from 196 teams in seven organizations. Through a validation of the measurement model, data from 138 teams are used for further analysis. The hypotheses effects are assessed using a structural equation model.

The analysis results indicate that both task uncertainty and task interdependency enhance knowledge protection regulation in teams, and that information technology support moderates the relationship between task uncertainty and knowledge protection regulation. The results also indicate that knowledge protection regulation improves inter-team coordination and team performance.

This study focuses on knowledge protection regulation by adopting communication privacy management theory at the team level. The findings imply that boundary management is the process of communication and depends on the role the teams play in accomplishing their tasks. The findings also provide a new way to understand knowledge flow of the teams as well as the entire organization.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how research teams serve as building blocks for collaboration at a field level, and how these building blocks are assembled by a network of interacting organizations. The field setting is a medical sciences consortium in Australia established to encourage collaborative and entrepreneurial research among government, industry, research centers and university units. This consortium is examined as a case study. The analysis demonstrates how collaboration evolved at three interacting levels: research team, organization and interorganizational field.

The main findings are: (1) Intellectual property (IP) acts as the key orienting agent in this field to align the behavior of various stakeholders and leverage collaborative and entrepreneurial activity. (2) Tensions between the different ways that the commercial and public sector actors value IP serve to structure the interfaces among the consortium, the member organizations and the research teams. (3) The consortium is a key infrastructural element in the creation of collaborative capital in the Australian biotechnology field studied. The main contribution of the study is to highlight the nature of collaborative capital at a field level and begin to explore its implications.

The purpose of this paper is to get deeper insight into the complex nature of the relationship between team learning conditions, team learning behaviours (TLBs) and innovative work behaviour (IWB) by considering and combining different neglected aspects in research.

A questionnaire was filled out by 593 vocational educators of 117 interdisciplinary work teams in vocational colleges in Germany. Correlations were calculated and structural equation modelling at two levels was conducted.

The results indicate that TLBs, especially team reflexivity and boundary spanning, relate positively to IWB. Furthermore, team structure, task interdependence and group potency relate positively to TLBs. It means that TLBs can be fostered by establishing these team learning conditions and, thus, IWB can be fostered.

The main limitation of the study is that the data collection was cross-sectional. Longitudinal studies are required to capture the dynamic character of team learning and to identify causal relationships.

It is important to make all employees in vocational education aware of the importance of TLBs especially of team reflexivity and boundary spanning.

This study provides practical implications for organisations to foster IWB and indications for a better understanding of the relationship between team learning conditions, TLBs and IWB considering and combining different neglected aspects such as examining TLBs separated in one study.

This paper aims to reveal learning potential in crossing disciplinary boundaries in facilitated workshops by exploring the research goal definition process of interdisciplinary research teams. It uses multilevel boundary crossing as a theoretical framework to illustrate the multilevel nature of team learning mechanisms in interdisciplinary research.

This study uses a qualitative case study approach. The data was collected from semi-structured interviews and collaborative workshops of interdisciplinary researchers. The data analysis is based on pre-existing theory and the process of analysis is both data and theory driven.

The results indicate that although defining interdisciplinary research goals is a complex and demanding task, collaborative and facilitated workshops may support boundary crossing on intrapersonal, interpersonal and institutional levels. The team members efforts in defining their shared research interest revealed dialogical learning mechanisms of identification, coordination, reflection and the first phases of transformation, particularly at the interpersonal level. However, the transformative actions seemed to require intentional team facilitation.

This case study enriches the existing literature and allows better understanding of how team facilitation can promote agenda setting, transformative learning mechanisms and the definition of joint research goals in interdisciplinary settings.

The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

The paper aims to propose a conceptualization of two types of team social capital: team-bonding and team-bridging social capital. Throughout the conceptual effort, the paper provides suggestions for future research avenues that link team social capital, as a distinct team-level construct, with other team research topics.

The conceptualization of team social capital is based on a review and synthesis of prior research about social networks. The propositions about the relationships of team social capital with other team process and effectiveness variables are developed within the classical input-mediator-output framework.

The conceptualizations of team-bonding and team-bridging social capital and the common measures for each are provided. Moreover, a series of testable propositions regarding the associations between team social capital and team process, the influence of team social capital on team effectiveness and the antecedents of team social capital are made.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

This paper elaborates the concept of team social capital and specifies its implications to various team phenomena. With this conceptual effort, this paper has advanced our knowledge about the nature and role of team social capital in team research.