ABSTRACT

The emergence of team-based organizations requires shifting the focus from an intra-team to an inter-team perspective so as to understand organizational functioning (Drach-Zahavy and Somech 2010). Teams need other teams for input essential to their functioning, because they cannot generate all the required resources independently. Consequently, teams must engage in boundary activities to protect, preserve, and/or acquire such resources (van Knippenberg 2003). Team boundary activities refer to those processes necessary for a team to be able to carry out the task at hand, activities which are directed toward external agents in the team’s focal environment (Drach-Zahavy and Somech 2010; Yan and Louis 1999). Although in the past three decades a great deal of theoretical and empirical work has emerged within boundary activity research (Ancona and Caldwell 1998; Choi 2002; Faraj and Yan 2009; Joshi, Pandey, and Han 2009; Marrone 2010; Yan and Louis 1999), the structure of the concept and its antecedents are not fully understood for three main reasons: First, although the literature has grasped the boundary activity phenomenon in the context of teams, it has focused on how specific members of the team communicate with external agencies for promoting team functioning (e.g., Johnson and Chang 2000) without considering how the team as a unit operates toward its boundary. Second, the common approach in the literature has been to refer to all boundary activities as unified “external activities,” overlooking the inherent differences among them (e.g., Choi 2002). Moreover, this approach focuses exclusively on external activities as contrasting sharply with internal activities (Ancona and Caldwell 1998; Choi 2002; Howell and Shea 2006; Marrone 2010).