Team boundary-spanning activities and performance of technology transfer organizations: evidence from China

A Contingency Framework for the Performance Consequences of Team Boundary Management: A Meta-Analysis of 30 Years of Research

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 such activities) as a key moderating factor that accounts for the varying effects. To test this framework, we use a meta-analytic approach that synthesizes >30 years of empirical research (i.e., 85 primary studies covering 10,848 teams). Our results show a positive main effect of team boundary management on team performance. Crucially, these performance benefits are more pronounced when the target of boundary management is extraorganizational rather than inside the home organization and when the type of boundary management activities is boundary spanning (e.g., coordination, representation, or information search) rather than boundary strengthening (e.g., buffering, guarding, or sentry activities). Moreover, boundary management is more effective when executed by formal team leaders rather than team members, and our results tentatively suggest that this may reflect differences in effectiveness between leaders and members in boundary strengthening, rather than boundary spanning. Overall, our 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.

Every coin has two sides: the impact of time pressure on employees’ knowledge hiding

Purpose

Time pressure is the most common kind of work pressure that employees face in the workplace; the existing research results on the effect of time pressure are highly controversial (positive, negative, inverted U-shaped). Especially in the era of knowledge economy, there remains a research gap in the impact of time pressure on individual knowledge hiding. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of different time pressure (challenge and hindrance) on knowledge hiding and to explain why there is controversy about the effect of time pressure in the academics.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected two waves of data and surveyed 341 R&D employees in China. Moreover, they used regression analysis, bootstrapping and Johnson–Neyman statistical technique to verify research hypotheses.

Findings

The results show that challenge time pressure (CTP) has a significant negative effect on knowledge hiding, whereas hindrance time pressure (HTP) has a significant positive effect on knowledge hiding; job security mediates the relationship between time pressure and knowledge hiding; temporal leadership strengthen the positive impact of CTP on job security; temporal leadership can mitigate the negative impact of HTP on job security.

Originality/value

The findings not only respond to the academic debate about the effect of time pressure and point out the reasons for the controversy but also enhance the scholars’ attention and understanding of the internal mechanism between time pressure and knowledge hiding.