Globally networked: Intraorganizational boundary spanning in the global organization

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Abstract

Multinational corporations (MNCs) need to sense, source, and mobilize knowledge when and where it arises, whether at home, or elsewhere in the world. For this reason, MNCs benefit from employee networks of relationships that span across intraorganizational barriers, allowing for the efficient mobilization of knowledge across boundaries. Yet, which organizational members are more likely to be able to develop these boundary spanning networks? We leverage a unique data set from a large multinational corporation to empirically test a comprehensive model that captures the effect of an employee’s mandate, expertise, and behavioral orientations on her likelihood to span intraorganizational boundaries that manifest themselves in the form of hierarchies, intra-functional domains, and geographic territories. We find that the employees that are more likely to be boundary spanners are those having mandates with a global impact, high levels of expertise, and a collaborative orientation in their networking behaviors. In addition, we find that these effects are stronger for those employees that have large formal workflow networks.

Introduction

In the International Business (IB) literature it has been highlighted that MNCs’ competitive raison d'être is cross-border knowledge creation, as well as transfer, and exploitation (Doz, Santos, & Williamson, 2001; Kogut & Zander, 1993). As the pace of technological change has accelerated, MNCs no longer have the luxury of simply cultivating home-grown responses to innovations by rivals. Staying abreast of requirements for continuous developments and innovations entails MNCs to sense, source, and mobilize new knowledge streams when and where they arise, whether at home or elsewhere in the world. Recognizing this aspect, IB scholars devoted considerable attention to the study of intraorganizational knowledge mobilization (Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000; Minbaeva, Pedersen, Björkman, Fey, & Park, 2003; Monteiro, Arvidsson, & Birkinshaw, 2008).

While most IB studies have focused on the organizational level, more recently, several scholars have argued for a focus on people, stressing the importance of exploring the micro-foundations of knowledge mobilization between the employees of MNCs (Foss, Husted, & Michailova, 2010; Foss & Pedersen, 2004; Haas & Cummings, 2014). The intuition behind this perspective is that it is not organizations, but the individual employees that tap into, and make use of knowledge for the benefit of organizations. Thus, individual employees are the key players building those informal and emergent networks that lubricate and complement the formal organizational processes and structures designed to guide decision making and knowledge mobilization (McEvily, Soda, & Tortoriello, 2014).

MNCs bring together individuals with very different profiles, from distant parts of the world, and of the organization (Earley & Gibson, 2002), thus offering a good platform for the formation of boundary spanning relations (Schotter, Mudambi, Doz, & Gaur, 2017). Previous research has devoted particular attention to three types of boundaries arising from the activities carried out in MNCs. Geographical boundaries, such as working in different countries, world regions, or international time zones (Cramton, 2001; Espinosa, Cummings, Wilson, & Pearce, 2003; Hinds & Mortensen, 2005). Structural boundaries, such as working in different functions or functional areas, divisions, or business units (Bartlett, Ghoshal, & Birkinshaw, 2003; Dasí, Pedersen, Gooderham, Elter, & Hildrum, 2017; Puranam, Raveendran, & Knudsen, 2012). Hierarchical boundaries, arising from differences in tenure, or formal levels in the organizational hierarchy (Reagans, Zuckerman, & McEvily, 2004; Zenger & Lawrence, 1989).

Relationships that cut across these boundaries span multiple knowledge domains, give people the ability to absorb and convey complex ideas to diverse audiences (Reagans & McEvily, 2003), and in turn promote worldwide learning and overall performance (Doz et al., 2001; Kogut & Zander, 1993). Boundary spanners are therefore those employees who act as knowledge intermediaries between different parties within and outside their organizations (Birkinshaw, Ambos, & Bouquet, 2017; Monteiro & Birkinshaw, 2017). Boundary spanners play a key role in global organizations, particularly in terms of accessing and mobilizing knowledge resources (Bouquet & Birkinshaw, 2008; Schotter & Beamish, 2011). Because of these reasons, MNCs have strong interests in the development of boundary spanning ties within the organization (Caimo & Lomi, 2015; Haas & Cummings, 2014).

Yet, while prior studies have highlighted the importance of boundary spanning ties (Birkinshaw et al., 2017; Minbaeva & Santangelo, 2017; Monteiro & Birkinshaw, 2017; Schotter et al., 2017), research has also shown that the very diversity that makes those ties valuable, also makes them difficult to establish and maintain (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997; Tsai, 2001). Moreover, as highlighted in Schotter et al. (2017, p. 404): “little is known about the characteristics of boundary spanners in global organizations and whether their capabilities are inherent or can be developed”. Taken together, this raises the important question: Which employees are more likely to develop work-related networks that crosscut intraorganizational barriers?

In order to answer this question, we leverage a unique data set from a large multinational corporation to empirically test a comprehensive model that captures the effect of an employee’s mandate, expertise, and behavioral orientations on her likelihood to span intraorganizational boundaries that manifest themselves in the form of hierarchies, intra-functional domains, and geographic territories. Based on opportunity-capacity-willingness theories of behavior (Blumberg & Pringle, 1982), we propose that the employees with work mandates that the organization regards as having a global impact, high levels of expertise, and collaborative networking attitudes should be more likely to have boundary spanning ties in their networks. We also propose that these mechanisms should be sensitive to the size of an employee’s formal workflow network. Our analysis of network data from a survey of 275 employees supports these arguments.

This paper makes a number of contributions. First, we leverage recent discussions highlighting a lack of knowledge about how boundary spanning works (Birkinshaw et al., 2017; Monteiro & Birkinshaw, 2017), and more generally about the factors that affect the effectiveness of boundary spanning (Schotter et al., 2017). As highlighted by Schotter et al. (2017, p. 413): “individual actors play an important role in the effectiveness of boundary spanning. […] However, not every individual may be equally effective in the boundary spanning function”. Our first contribution is to advance the discussion aimed at better characterizing the boundary spanners of global organizations by showing that the employees that are more likely to develop work-related networks that crosscut intraorganizational barriers are those with the right mandate, expertise, and behavioral attitudes.

Second, boundaries in global organizations may be of different nature. Most traditionally, IB research has distinguished between geographic, functional, and hierarchical boundaries. Very often, however, research on boundary spanning has focused on one specific type of boundaries at a time (Birkinshaw et al., 2017; Minbaeva & Santangelo, 2017; Monteiro & Birkinshaw, 2017; Roberts & Beamish, 2017). Different from this approach, our model puts forward the idea that many of the factors that can be associated with boundary spanning activities can simultaneously facilitate the spanning of boundaries that manifest themselves in the form of hierarchies, intra-functional domains, and geographic territories. Our results confirm these intuitions, showing that boundary spanning simultaneously happens on all the three dimensions, Yet, to further investigate the nature of these results, in post hoc analyses we also disaggregated our dependent variable into the three key dimensions of geographical, intra-functional and hierarchical boundary spanning, and explored the specific impact of our explanatory variables on each dimension separately. By doing so, we provide initial evidence on which aspects matter the most for the spanning of specific boundaries, while controlling out for potential confounding factors.

Third, we relate to the criticism that has been raised against the more structuralist accounts of boundary spanning, which tend to conflate the “position” occupied and the “role” performed by the boundary spanners (Birkinshaw et al., 2017; Monteiro & Birkinshaw, 2017; Schotter et al., 2017; Soda, Stea, & Pedersen, 2019; Stea & Pedersen, 2017). Our contribution in this sense, is to put forward a model that simultaneously considers both the more structural drivers of boundary spanning (that is, the mandate of those employees that are formally assigned to roles with global implications, and the size of their formal workflow networks), but also the more behavioral aspects of how skilled employees are, and of how they engage in networking behaviors. Our final contribution is more empirical in nature. As recently pointed out by Schotter et al.: “existing research on boundary spanning and boundary spanners is predominantly conceptual or based on a limited number of case studies” (Schotter et al., 2017, p. 404). While building on many of the important theoretical insights developed in conceptual or case-based research, we are able to put our theoretical arguments to an empirical test using a rich primary dataset including 275 complete responses from the supply chain function of a large, global organization. In doing so, we join recent efforts (Minbaeva & Santangelo, 2017) aimed at answering the call to approach the study of boundary spanning also using quantitative approaches.

Section snippets

Boundary spanning networks in global organizations

A growing research stream conceptualizes the organizational context as one of network relations where employees are represented by nodes connected to one another via relational ties (Borgatti & Halgin, 2011; Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve, & Tsai, 2004). In this view, ties constitute the informal emerging pipes through which information and knowledge is mobilized within the organization (Soda & Zaheer, 2012). Intraorganizational ties are thus important as much as they are unavoidable because they

Research context

We tested our theory in the Supply Chain function of a global company, which we will label “BigEye” for anonymity reasons. Being one of the most critical functions for BigEye, the organization’s top management was highly interested in understanding the organizational functioning “behind the chart”, particularly with respect to the patterns of informal collaborations across the employees working there. BigEye has annual net sales of more than $9 billion, employing almost 80 thousand people, and

Analysis and results

The correlation matrix for all variables including mean values, standard deviation, minimum and maximum values are shown in Table 1. It is noticeable that all three hypothesized variables (global impact, expert and collaborative networking orientation) have significant and positive bivariate correlations with the boundary spanning index (from 0.20 to 0.29).

None of the independent variables have correlations that indicate problems of multicollinearity. The highest bivariate correlations are

Discussion

While it is widely accepted that boundary spanning ties are very beneficial to MNCs (Birkinshaw et al., 2017; Klueter & Monteiro, 2017; Monteiro & Birkinshaw, 2017; Schotter et al., 2017), research on social capital has also raised awareness about the potentially problematic nature of ties that cut across different organizational boundaries (Caimo & Lomi, 2015; Soda et al., 2019; Stea & Pedersen, 2017). On the one hand, boundary spanning ties are likely to tap into different knowledge

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