ABSTRACT
Increasingly, work in organizations is performed by individuals from different cultural and functional backgrounds who are joined together to solve problems, deliver services, or design new products and processes— sometimes without even meeting face to face. Such variation in cultural and functional backgrounds within teams at work can complicate productive collaboration by creating intragroup knowledge boundaries, or “faultlines,” that separate team members into expertise subgroups (Lau & Murnighan, 1998). Knowledge boundaries can emerge from differences in expertise (e.g., jargon taken for granted in one discipline can be incomprehensible in another), national heritage (e.g., differences in language and local norms can hinder communication), organization (e.g., behavior customary to a flat, informal company may seem inappropriate in a hierarchical, formal company), location (e.g., information and processes available at one site may differ from that available in another), and even age and gender. Unless recognized, thoughtfully managed, and embraced for learning, such knowledge boundaries can undermine the effectiveness of diverse teams.
