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The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical perspective on whether the boundary-spanner model and consequently complex disaggregated intra-MNE value chain activities are crisis resilient.

The paper is a conceptual theory development based on literature integration and phenomenological juxtaposing.

The need for boundary-spanning in assisting dispersed new and complex knowledge creation activities – which can hardly be replicated in virtual collaboration spaces alone – will endure if not even grow. This requires deeper understanding of boundary spanning in the context of the globally dispersed MNE. Increased location diversification engendered by COVID-19 implies a greater need for the boundary spanning function, not less.

Regarding future research, the crisis provides a unique opportunity for taking a closer look at the formation, nurturing and resilience of interdependence, particularly behavioural interdependence and the actions and characteristics of individuals associated with [boundary spanning] actions. Specific research questions should focus on the boundary-spanning model in the virtual space; the characteristics and effects of temporality and the boundary-spanning model, the specific actions of boundary spanners during unforeseen events and the empirical testing of the relationships developed in Table 1.

For practitioners, I suggest avoiding compromising structural interdependence with defaulting on top-down hierarchical approaches during crises; and while doing so, not paying attention to the effects of such actions on behavioural interdependence and its champions (i.e. global boundary spanners). Such interference likely results in sub-optimal global collaboration outcomes and innovation, characterized by fundamentally recursive processes involving creativity, failure, reconfiguring, sensemaking and improvisation.

TBC

The author develops a critical perspective to assess the crisis-resilience of the boundary-spanning model. In so doing, I juxtapose two contemporary views on the persistence or fading of the global MNE model, and hence, the future need for a socio-behavioural managerial function – like boundary-spanning – connecting dispersed MNE activities. The authors provide numerous avenues for advancing extant research on boundary-spanning in MNEs.

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.

Within public services there is a widely recognised role for workers who operate across organisational and professional boundaries. Much of this literature focusses on the organisational implications rather than on how boundary spanners engage with citizens. An increased number of public service roles require boundary spanning to support citizens with cross-cutting issues. The purpose of this paper is to explicate the emotional labour within the interactions that boundary spanners have with citizens, requiring adherence to display rules and building trust.

This is a conceptual paper which draws on illustrative examples to draw out the emotional labour within two types of boundary spanning: explicit and emergent.

Emotional labour theory offers a way to classify these interactions as requiring high, medium or low degrees of emotional labour. Boundary spanning theory contributes an understanding of how emotional labour is likely to be differently experienced depending on whether the boundary spanning is an explicit part of the job, or an emergent property.

Drawing on examples from public service work in a range of advanced democracies, the authors make a theoretical argument, suggesting that a more complete view of boundary spanning must account for individual-level affect and demands upon workers. Such a focus captures the “how” of the boundary spanning public encounter, and not just the institutional, political and organisational dimensions examined in most boundary spanning literatures.

Megaprojects present an intricated pattern of leadership activities, which evolve over their planning and delivery and comprises several stakeholders. A framework is useful to navigate this complexity; it allows to identify and cluster the key elements. This paper aims to introduce a novel framework based on boundary spanners to describe the structural pattern of shared leadership in megaprojects.

A systematic literature review about boundary spanning and shared leadership is used to identify and cluster the key elements of shared leadership in megaprojects. The systematic literature review provides a rich theoretical background to develop the novel shared leadership framework based on boundary spanners.

There are three key dimensions characterizing shared leadership topology in megaprojects: stakeholders, boundary spanning leadership roles and project phases. The novel framework shows how project leadership dynamically transfers among different stakeholders, showing the importance of shared leadership as a leadership paradigm in megaprojects.

The novel framework epitomizes shared leadership in megaprojects by exploring its antecedents with social network metrics. This paper stresses that shared leadership is the envisaged form of leadership in megaprojects. By modeling complex project leadership in a simple, yet effective way, the framework fosters critical thinking for future research. The modeling introduced by this framework would also benefit practitioners in charge of megaprojects.

The paper moves the project leadership research to the network-level by taking boundary spanners as shared leadership roles in megaprojects. It shows how shared leadership is a valuable management tool for planning and delivery megaprojects.

Technological firms increasingly depend on open innovation to compete in hypercompetitive markets. To openly engage the creativity of a multitude of private actors, firms can rely on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing challenges global companies as they span organizational boundaries to attract multiple local partners. Global companies must engage in boundary spanning to successfully communicate and create a sense of community with smaller local partners despite status and cultural differences. The collaboration between Google and developers in China deserves to be studied in particular, because it operates within a restricted market.

This paper argues that crowdsourcing for innovation on a global scale requires effective boundary spanning capabilities. These boundary-spanning practices ensure smooth cooperation with the crowd and solve problems relating to differences in status and organizational contexts. This study applies Bourdieu's theory of practice including the concept of capital (economic, intellectual, social and symbolic) to understand the social relationships between Google and a growing community of Chinese developers. It also draws on a case study including ten semistructured interviews, which have been triangulated with internal documents and data from selected websites.

Four types of capital (symbolic, intellectual, social and economic) have been identified as important devices to understand the sources of power and the stakes of Googlers and developers in the joint field. These types of capital contribute to structure the social fields in which developers and Google cooperate and their practice. The success of the collaboration between Google and Chinese developers can arguably be attributed to Google's ability to create boundary-spanning activities in order to reduce the endowment differential in the four types of capital and improve their communication. Therefore, this research provides a deep and conceptualized description of boundary-spanning practices, as well as providing a useful contribution for managers involved in crowdsourcing via platform in culturally different markets.

The main limitation of this study is methodological in nature, relating to the absence of interviews with board members of Google China who are reluctant to speak about Google activities in China for political raisons. This restriction is partly counterbalanced by the analysis of publicly available secondary data such as news and communications.

This research has generated practical recommendations for managers of organizations, which require optimal boundary spanning for crowdsourcing. Managers must understand the different sources of social boundaries between their organization and the crowd. The crowd should be segmented into smaller groups with distinctive identities, and organizations should systematically design boundary-spanning activities to address each boundary of each segment. The boundary-spanning activities involve a specific set of tools, programs and platforms to address the target group. Efficient boundary spanning depends on the necessity to select boundary spanners with high cultural intelligence and communication skills.

This paper draws on Bourdieu's theory of practice to investigate the role of boundary spanning in crowdsourcing for innovation, specifically in the joint field between Google and Chinese developers. This research reveals how boundary objects such as developer documents, websites, programs and events are essential for developers to be able to participate on Google's platform. Companies should be prepared to invest in the design and delivery of boundary-spanning activities and objects, knowing that these are also a locus for negotiation with local partners.

This research contributes to the literature by applying the boundary-spanner theory to Google crowdsourcing practices within a restricted market. Bourdieu's theory of practice has proven to be a potent perspective with which to better understand the positive role of boundary spanners in the joint field between Google and Chinese developers. Moreover, this practice perspective has not been used in prior research to highlight power relations in crowdsourcing for innovation. This study has shown that, in addition to boundary objects, boundary spanners can also contribute in the transfer of intellectual capital, which is the pivotal resource for boundary spanning in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to address the research question: How does the social entrepreneur’s compassion inform how they engage with their environment to mobilize resources for social entrepreneurial action?

The study features a comparative case study analysis of seven high-profile social entrepreneurs within Cape Town, South Africa. Data via in-depth interviews, site visits and archival information and follow-up conversations were collected and then analyzed via thematic coding of qualitative analysis.

The findings suggest that compassion is an antecedent for the social entrepreneurial boundary spanning shaped by their orientation toward concern for others’ well-being. Propositions presented offer the groundwork for an emergent theoretical framework of social entrepreneurial boundary spanning.

The study builds upon the emerging compassion research within social entrepreneurship, extending the conceptualization of compassion to be shapers of the social structure – not just the individual or the organization – in an emerging market context.

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 paper seeks to advance the study of knowledge boundary spanning by approaching spanning as a process that involves four spanning mechanisms.

Building on the insights from practice‐based view of knowledge and knowledge management literature more generally, the authors formalize and articulate two spanning mechanisms (boundary practice and boundary discourse), in addition to two other previously established spanning mechanisms (boundary object and boundary spanner).

The paper formalizes two further spanning mechanisms and suggests an integrative framework for examining the mutual and compounding effect between the four spanning mechanisms. Building on the suggested framework, the process of spanning is analysed as a time‐based combination of various mechanisms which evolve over time. The framework opens new windows to look at the projective and emergent mode of spanning mechanisms as a duality, rather than a dualism.

Researchers are freed to explore the deployment order of the spanning mechanisms and the conflicting or synergistic effects. Practitioners would benefit from tracing successful spanning processes for replicating in similar contexts to advance collaboration efforts.

Boundary practice and boundary discourse are introduced as well as synthesizing the mechanisms into a coherent framework. Viewing boundary spanning as a process that includes dynamic combination of four spanning mechanisms is a particularly novel insight that can stimulate future research avenues.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of boundary-spanning organisations as intermediary institutions potentially able to close the gap between applied research and practice in sustainability accounting.

A review of the literature reveals that boundary organisation theory provides a potential way of understanding the role of boundary-spanning organisations in the context of the research–practice gap. The theory is applied in the context of three cases of potential boundary-spanning organisations involved with sustainability accounting – Chartered Accountants in Australia and New Zealand, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the International Federation of Accountants.

Findings from the three cases, which consider the application of boundary organisation theory, indicate the potential for professional accounting associations to act as sustainability accounting boundary-spanning organisations has not been realized for four main reasons. These relate to the need for finer granularity in relation to boundary objects and problem-solving; uncertainty about the range of parties to be involved as boundary-spanning organisations; the importance of reconciling views about different incentives for academics and practitioners in the sustainability accounting space; and the necessity for collaboration with other boundary-spanning organisations to address the transdisciplinary nature of sustainability accounting.

Development of a way of seeing the relationships between academics and practitioners in the context of sustainability accounting has two messages for practice and practitioners. First, with such complex and uncertain issues as sustainability accounting, a transdisciplinary approach to resolving problems is needed, one which involves practitioners as integral and equal members of research teams. The process should help bring applied academic and practitioner interests closer together. Second, it has to be recognised that academics conducting basic research do not seek to engage with practitioners, and for this group, the academic–practitioner gap will remain.

Two main social implications emerge from the application of boundary organisation theory to analyse the academic–practitioner gap in the context of sustainability accounting. First, development of boundary organisations is important, as they can play a crucial role in bringing parties with an interest in sustainability accounting together in transdisciplinary teams to help solve sustainability problems. Second, collaboration is a foundation for success in the process of integrating applied researchers and practitioners, different disciplines which are relevant to solving sustainability problems and collaboration between different boundary spanning organisations with their own specialised foci.

This paper considers boundary organisation theory and the role of boundary-spanning organisations in the context of the complex transdisciplinary problems of sustainability accounting.

Solutions provision depends on effective and efficient supply chains. Existing discourse within servitization has remained at the organisational or inter-organisational level with a limited emphasis on the role of individuals. However, supply chains are not just relationships between organisations, they are complex, inter-personal relationships that span organisational boundaries. The limited focus on boundary spanners and their interactions means that managerial roles critical for the provision of solutions remain unidentified. The purpose of this paper is to identify the functions, roles and practices of boundary spanners that connect organisations and enable the effective provision of solutions.

A case study comprising 61 interviews in 11 firms was conducted in the UK network of a commercial vehicles manufacturer, to investigate boundary spanning for product and solutions provision.

The functions of boundary spanners move from communicating product and price features in product provision towards strategic communication, dissonance reduction, professional education, consultation and leveraging offerings in solutions provision. The study also identifies the boundary spanning roles and practices that form these functions for solutions provision.

This is the first study in servitization that identifies and describes the boundary spanning functions, roles and practices. By adopting the lens of boundary spanning, the research addresses the lack of empirical managerial-level enquiry within servitization research. It extends the theoretical discussion on the differences between supply chain management in servitized vs product contexts.