Seminar (Dept. of Organization and Human Resources)

Title: A contingency framework for the performance consequences of team boundary management

Speaker: Thom de Vries (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)

Time: 15:00 (Wednesday), May 24, 2023

Venue: Room 706, Mingde Business Building

Language：English

ABSTRACT:

Research suggests that teams can greatly enhance their performance through boundary management, which comprises activities that establish, maintain, and regulate linkages with the surrounding environment. However, such performance gains do not materialize equally in all instances and some teams struggle to benefit from boundary management. Integrating insights from social-network and team-level resource-allocation theories, we develop a contingency framework that considers the internal organization of a team’s boundary management (i.e., the carrier, target, and type of activities) as key moderating factors that account for the varying effects. To test this framework, we use a meta-analytic approach. Our results show a positive main effect of team boundary management on team performance. Crucially, however, these performance benefits are more pronounced when the target of boundary management is extra-organizational rather than inside the home organization, and when the type of boundary-management activities is boundary spanning (e.g., coordination, representation, or general information search) rather than boundary strengthening (e.g., buffering, guarding or sentry activities). Moreover, the study shows that boundary management is not more effective when executed by team members than by formal team leaders. These findings advance theory on team boundary management by clarifying previously ambiguous findings and illustrating how teams can design their boundary-management activities to be most effective.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Thom de Vries is an associate professor in the Department of Human Resource Management & Organization Behavior at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in Management from the same university (cum laude). His research interests include teams and novel team-based organizations (e.g., multiteam systems), interteam and interorganizational coordination (e.g., boundary spanning, team external activities, interorganizational collaboration), team and organization performance and resilience. He has worked as a Fulbright visiting scholar at Michigan State University and published in top-tier academic journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Supply Chain Management, and Supply Chain Management.