Knowledge differences impede the work of cross-functional teams by making knowledge integration difficult, especially when the teams are faced with novelty. One approach in the literature for ...overcoming these difficulties, which we refer to as the traverse approach, is for team members to identify, elaborate, and then explicitly confront the differences and dependencies across the knowledge boundaries. This approach emphasizes deep dialogue and requires significant resources and time. In an exploratory in-depth longitudinal study of three quite different cross-functional teams, we found that the teams were able to cogenerate a solution without needing to identify, elaborate, and confront differences and dependencies between the specialty areas. Our analysis of the extensive team data collected over time surfaced practices that minimized members' differences during the problem-solving process. We suggest that these practices helped the team to
transcend
knowledge differences rather than
traverse
them. Characteristic of these practices is that they avoided interpersonal conflict, fostered the rapid cocreation of intermediate scaffolds, encouraged continued creative engagement and flexibility to repeatedly modify solution ideas, and fostered personal responsibility for translating personal knowledge to collective knowledge. The contrast between these two approaches to knowledge integration—traverse versus transcend—suggests the need for more nuanced theorizing about the use of boundary objects, the nature of dialogue, and the role of organizational embeddedness in understanding how knowledge differences are integrated.
Achieving proper levels of integration across functional boundaries is a major challenge for firms. Rigorous cross-functional planning processes have arisen within companies in hopes of achieving ...greater levels of integration. Sales and operations planning is one such process designed to help companies better align customer demand with product supply. Yet, achieving success with such supply chain processes has continued to elude many firms. This research applies social identity theory to the study of sales and operations planning to see if fostering superordinate identity can help integration efforts in this unique cross-functional team setting. Results confirm the importance of superordinate team identity in achieving sales and operations planning performance. Furthermore, factors that support superordinate identity formation among teams are identified and discussed.
•Decision making latitude and joint rewards foster S&OP team social identity.•Information quality and resource support foster S&OP team social identity.•Team social identity positively impacts S&OP performance.•Team social identity formation connects antecedents to S&OP performance.
Innovation management research has recently pointed out that competitive advantage depends on the ability to connect knowledge at both intra- and inter-organisational levels through multiplex ...boundary work. Resource-based view (RBV) and knowledge-based view (KBV) can provide valuable and complementary insights to understand which individual-level determinants enable knowledge exchange through collaborative boundary work. Based on these arguments, we adopt a microfoundational approach to explore, through a multiple-embedded case study of seven small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), the individual characteristics that make organisational members able to connect across boundaries and perform effective multiplex boundary work for collaborative innovation. Our findings show the relevance of three sets of individual determinants (i.e., openness to others, assertiveness, and balancing skills). This study extends the RBV and the KBV by identifying the main individual determinants that represent an essential resource base for leveraging internal and external knowledge in SMEs' engaging in multiplex boundary work for collaborative innovation.
In response to the prevalent deployment of teams in organizations, there is a need to jointly consider conflict and social capital within the teams to offer novel ways to understand group process. ...This study proposes that the association between intragroup conflict and group social capital may be dynamic and reciprocal. Specifically, this study investigates longitudinally how intragroup conflict influences group social capital within cross-functional teams and recognizes whether the teams with high group social capital can further produce intragroup conflict. The two-year longitudinal study sampled 527 individuals in 90 teams across two time periods. This study finds that when teams are formed (Time 1), task conflict relates positively to structural social capital, and relationship conflict relates negatively to cognitive social capital. There is an inverted U-type relationship between task conflict at Time 1 and social capital at Time 2. Established teams (Time 2) with higher levels of social capital experience higher levels of task conflict and lower levels of relationship conflict than teams with lower levels of social capital.
Organizations often use cross‐functional teams to make key Operations and Supply Chain Management decisions, but doing so risks instigating conflict between team members since cross‐functional ...delegates often have opposing functional goals. While previous work has explored the effect of functional goals (i.e., external motivation) in cross‐functional team performance, we extend research in this area to incorporate individual team members' psychological needs (i.e., internal motivation). Specifically, we consider how the interplay of these motivational mechanisms can lead to status conflict within the team, and the ensuing implications on team performance. We conduct an experiment of 136 ad hoc team‐based sourcing decisions, complemented with a sequential qualitative study involving interviews with 37 practicing managers. The results show that functional goal misalignment leads to status conflict, as expected. Yet, counterintuitively, this effect can be mitigated with the team's composition in individual psychological needs for dominance, specifically with heterogeneously dominant individuals. Our study contributes to the behavioral operations management literature on sourcing teams and to the team motivation literature. We provide guidance on how managers can compose cross‐functional teams to improve decision outcomes considering the interplay of external and internal motivational mechanisms.
Author Video
The separation between editorial and business activities of news organisations has long been a fundamental norm of journalism. Journalists have traditionally considered this separation as both an ...ethical principle and an organisational solution to preserve their professional autonomy and isolate their newsrooms from profit-driven pressures exerted by advertising, sales and marketing departments. However, many news organisations are increasingly integrating their editorial and commercial operations. Based on 41 interviews conducted at 12 newspapers and commercial broadcasters in six European countries, we analyse how editors and business managers describe the changing relationship between their departments. Drawing on previous research on journalistic norms and change, we focus on how interviewees use rhetorical discourses and normative statements to de-construct traditional norms, build new professionally accepted norms and legitimise new working practices. We find, first, that the traditional norm of separation no longer plays the central role that it used to. Both editors and managers are working to foster a cultural change that is seen as a prerequisite for organisational adaptation to an increasingly challenging environment. Second, we find that a new norm of integration, based on the values of collaboration, adaptation and business thinking, has emerged. Third, we show how the interplay between declining and emerging norms involves a difficult negotiation. Whereas those committed to the traditional norm see commercial considerations as a threat to professional autonomy, our interviewees see the emerging norm as a new way of ensuring professional autonomy by working with other parts of the organisation to jointly ensure commercial sustainability.
Today’s organizations rely on networks of dynamic systems of “agile” teams to get work done. Teams are distributed, transient, and loosely bounded in service of responsiveness and innovation. The key ...to this new way of doing work is managing the networked ecosystem in which teams are embedded. But in the context of leading multiple teams with fuzzy boundaries and shifting membership, the average overwhelmed manager quickly defaults to what is nearest in urgency: managing internal team dynamics and responding to internal customer demands. Drawn from field interviews with 100 top-performing team leaders, this article presents a framework-for-action to leaders who want to engage the networked ecosystem with intention and precision, including specific tactics for identifying and influencing high-leverage stakeholders.
Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) decisions, such as make-or-buy or vendor selections, are highly dependent on the cooperation of several functions in decision-making teams in order to make more ...holistic and effective decisions. However, members of cross-functional PSM teams often also pursue diverse goals rooted in functional incentive structures that may lead to misalignment and competition. One of the resulting problems are so-called “organizational politics”, being self-serving influence attempts among functional representatives. Examples can be nondisclosure of information, coalitions, or lobbying to protect unidimensional functional interests that potentially obstruct effective PSM decision making. So far, PSM scholars have made exploratory and inductive inquiries in team politics while the larger body of research on politics exists outside the PSM scope. Thus, as PSM scholarship transcends toward deductive theory testing designs on team politics, the fields is at risk taking isolated perspectives and failing to deduce from the extant disaggregated “general management” literature on politics. In response to this emerging trend, we review 91 contributions to the organizational literature on politics at the individual, team or group, and dyadic (individual-individual) level to build a future research framework on politics in real-world cross-functional PSM decision-making teams. To do so, we distinguish thematic areas of interest and derive future avenues for research in light of ongoing PSM debates on human resource management in PSM, leadership in PSM teams, and top management support of PSM. Furthermore, we derive epistemological, instrumental, and theoretical guidance on how to approach politics in cross-functional PSM teams.
•Politics are a major challenge to cross-functional teams.•Emerging PSM team politics studies are at risk taking isolated perspectives.•Cross-disciplinary systematic literature review of 91 politics contributions.•Elaboration of results in light of several established scholarly PSM debates.•Derivation of epistemological, instrumental, and theoretical guidance for PSM studies.
Organizations increasingly rely on flexible work arrangements, such as innovation task forces and quickly assemble members with diverse expertise needed to create innovative solutions to problems. ...The literature has produced mixed findings on the relationship between member familiarity and innovation, which we suggest may be explained by two forms of coordination: expertise and dialogic. We hypothesize and find that dialogic coordination produces more innovative outcomes for unfamiliar task forces, while expertise coordination produces more innovative outcomes for familiar task forces. Furthermore, dialogic coordination in unfamiliar task forces is associated with greater innovative outcomes than expertise coordination in familiar task forces. Our results also highlight the importance of temporal dynamics of dialogic coordination in task force work. Hypotheses were tested through a longitudinal analysis of survey data with external ratings of the innovation outcome from 179 individuals in 32 innovation task forces from 13 U.S.-based firms in the top 10% of the world's growth industries during a period of recession. The findings contribute to an understanding of coordination in contemporary turbulent work environments.
Purpose
Organizations increasingly rely on cross-functional teams to deal with supply chain (SC) disruptions. These teams may use their broad range of connections and expertise to gather or scout ...relevant information, enabling them to develop integrative countermeasures and increase their organization’s resilience. Despite their potential, cross-functional teams often struggle to attain information scouting’s prospective benefits for effectively resolving disruptions. By drawing from group information-processing theory, this study aims to explore when and how cross-functional teams can realize information scouting’s full potential for ensuring their organization’s resilience.
Design/methodology/approach
Multisource, multi-informant data were collected from 80 cross-functional teams exposed to SC disruptions in a realistic SC management simulation.
Findings
The results show that a cross-functional team’s ability to effectively use information scouting for ensuring its organization’s resilience is contingent upon the degree to which the team’s members share information and align decisions internally (i.e. internal integration). The findings further reveal that this moderating role of internal integration is strengthened when the cross-functional team faces a volatile environment in which multiple SC disruptions are likely to occur (i.e. higher SC vulnerability).
Originality/value
This study contributes by advancing a more complete perspective on how a cross-functional team may contribute to its organization’s resilience. Specifically, the present research reveals how the benefits of a cross-functional team’s information scouting for dealing with SC disruptions are critically dependent upon internal conditions within the team, as well as external conditions related to its organization’s overall SC (i.e. beyond individual dyadic relationships).
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