The Process of Team Boundary Spanning in Multi-Organizational Contexts - Sarah Harvey, Randall S. Peterson, and N. Anand

528 Small Group Research 45(5)
While early stage linking activity draws on the resources of an external
actor or helps define a role for the team within the broader environment,
imprinting its initial strategy in this way also constrains the team’s future
activities because it determines external actors’ expectations about a team’s
role and goals (Dougherty & Heller, 1994; Galunic & Eisenhardt, 1996).
However, as accomplishing a team’s mandate often requires reaching
beyond a single organization, a team may need to break these expectations
to successfully complete its task. We therefore suggest that during midstage
interactions, building activity helps the team to define a new relationship
with the external actors with whom it has first established legitimacy
(i.e., the founding actor), and in doing so, can organize the team to meet its
unique goals.
Proposition 2: Mid-stage building activity with the external actor to
whom the team first linked (the founding actor) enables it to develop processes
and practices to meet its goals.
The sequence of activities described so far creates two challenges for
teams. First, by focusing on one external actor, other external actors may
not view themselves as part of the team’s environment. Second, while
building activity serves the instrumental purpose of enabling the team to
complete its task effectively, the more the team alters its processes and
structures to be able to innovate, the less it conforms strictly to an existing
actor’s expectations, and therefore the less legitimate it may appear to that
actor (Arndt & Bigelow, 2000). The team therefore risks losing its founding
support.
We suggest that late-stage building activity with an alternate external
actor enables a COT to overcome these challenges. This was a critical point
of departure of the inside-out and outside-in sequences we observed.
Building activity with an alternate external actor enables teams to establish
the legitimacy of their newly formed practices with the actor to whom the
team first linked and to build a relationship with other external actors. The
need to interact with other external actors provides a justification for the
team’s changing relationship with the original external actor that it linked
to. Conflicts in the assumptions, values, and goals of actors in a team’s
environment are likely to exist (Denison, Hart, & Kahn, 1996). In one
sense, reconciling these conflicts by meeting the needs of multiple actors is
the reason the teams exist; these conflicts therefore provide an opportunity
for a team (Benson, 1977). By building with other external actors, a team
can capitalize on the inconsistency created by the conflict between actors to
build and retain legitimacy. In this way, iterating between the practices and
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