Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 2,3, University of Hagen, language: English, abstract: Increasing dynamicity of global business environment necessitates the adoption of boundary spanning in order for an organization to survive global competitiveness. This essay aims to identify personal characteristics that an invidividual should bring in order to realize a successful boundary spanner in a multinational team. In the study, it was noted that the task for boundary spanners is to bridge intergroup challenges facing organizations by establishing sharing ties between different groups in order to enable the flow of knowledge, information, resources and people. The boundary spanning activities thus enables an organization to achieve a common team spirit and hence ensures efficient and effective work flow. To effectively achieve boundary spanners‘ role, an individual should possess negotiation skills, mediation skills, assimilation skills, coaching and institutional engagement skills. The person should further possess personal qualities of imagination, empathy, optimism and modesty are more likely to be successful at acquiring the skill sets required for a successful boundary spanning. Tactics for boundary spanning leadership that needs to be considered for a successful boundary spanning include: boundary suspending, boundary reframing, boundary nesting, and weaving tactic. The leadership behaviour for boundary spanning should create and maintain favourable relationships with not only the peers but also with the superiors and outsiders who provide information, political support, and resources. The leaders need to be influential to get essential resources and support from key management. They need to have good negotiation skills. The leaders should further be sensitive to changes in the external environment by analysing information concerning relevant events and changes within the external surroundings of an organization. The study noted that one of the key sources of information exchange and communication is boundary spanners, which usually find much relevance in culturally distant marketplaces. However, one of the challenges is that their performance may be hard to measure, and the process may need much time and resources. At times, the boundary spanners from opposite ends may fail to reach a consensus after long time engagements in networking, external watching, and representing.

PRAISE FOR BOUNDARY SPANNING LEADERSHIP "Fostering a culture of teamwork among business units and partners is crucial for bottom-line success. This groundbreaking book, packed with practical examples and based on solid research, shows us how to get started." -- Marc Noel, Chairman, Noël Group LLC "In this deeply insightful look at the demands on 21st-century leaders, Ernst and Chrobot-Mason outline six boundary spanning leadership practices derived from case studies and research with thousands of participating managers. This work is bound to be one of the mostimportant management books of the decade." -- David A. Thomas, Ph.D., H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor ofBusiness Administration at Harvard Business School "Few books capture the needs and narrative of today's business and so elegantly lay out a plan to address its challenges. Boundary Spanning Leadership nails this . . . Consume it and play your role!" -- Andy Stefanovich, Chief Curator and Provocateur, Prophet "Boundary Spanning Leadership draws on rigorous global research and real-world experience to help leaders move into new frontiers where they can find answers and practices for creating success." -- Jack Stahl, former CEO, Revlon, and President /COO, Coca-Cola "The future will be punctuated by new spans across old boundaries. This book shows you how to improve your span ability." -- Bob Johansen, Ph.D., Distinguished Fellow, Institute for the Future, and bestselling author ofGet There Early and Leaders Make the Future Catalyze collaboration, drive innovation, transform your organization--with Boundary Spanning Leadership you can put it ALL together! We live in a world of vast collaborative potential. Yet all too often, powerful boundaries create barriers that can splinter groups. And this can lead to uninspiring results. To transform borders into frontiers in today's global, multistakeholder organizations, you needBoundary Spanning Leadership. Powered by a decade of global research and practice by the top-ranked Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), this book takes you from rural towns in the United States to Hong Kong's skyline and from a modernizing South Africa to the bustling streets of India, showing you how to build bridges across boundaries. Through compelling stories and practical tools and tactics, you’ll learn how to apply the six boundary spanning practices that occur at the nexus where groups collide, intersect, and link: Buffering defines boundaries to create safety Reflecting creates understanding of boundaries to foster respect Connecting suspends boundaries to build trust Mobilizing reframes boundaries to develop community Weaving interlaces boundaries to advance interdependence Transforming cross-cuts boundaries to enable reinvention Together, these practices combine to create what authors Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason call the Nexus Effect. The Nexus Effect allows groups to be more agile in response to changing markets; be more flexible in devising and deploying cross-functional learning and problem-solvingcapabilities; work with partners in deeper, more open relationships; empower virtual teams; and create a welcoming, diverse, and inclusive organization that brings out everybody's best. Boundaries exist. What matters most is how you work to bridge these divides and transform your organization's wide-ranging talents and knowledge to deliver value. With Boundary Spanning Leadership, the possibilities are limitless. For more about the book and free resources, visit www.spanboundaries.com.

Boundary spanning behavior is important for both public, non-profit and private organizations to ‘survive’: to stay relevant in relation to the environment, to innovate, to improve performance and to collaborate in an effective manner, especially in multi-organizational settings. Providing an assessment of factors influencing the work and effectiveness of boundary spanners, and discussing the impact of boundary spanners on different types of outcomes (collaboration, trust, organizational innovation), this book offers a coherent overview of the evolution of boundary spanning in an interactive governance context.

This book provides an overview of current approaches and research in the field of international organizations with a focus on implementation issues in a globalized context. Written by a team of recognized leaders in the field, associated with the growing and influential International Organizations Network (ION). Covers topical issues such as managing virtual teams and globalization. Makes a cohesive statement about the field of international organizations. Is written with a focus on implementation issues. Offers a solid contribution to the closing of the gap between researchers and practitioners.

In more recent times, the essence of the gatekeeper's role has moved to the 'boundary spanner' - a systems thinker who understands the specific needs and interests of the organization and whose greatest asset is their ability to move across and through the formal and informal features of the modern organization. There are many types of boundaries associated with an organization, for example, horizontal, (function and expertise), vertical (status, hierarchy), geographic, demographic, and stakeholder. Boundaries are "the defining characteristic of organizations and, boundary roles are the link between the environment and the organization" (Aldrich & Herker, 1977) with functions crucial to the effectiveness and success of the organization. Despite being a critical success factor for an organization, beginning in the 1970s, the term - 'boundary spanning' has had an intermittent research history: there has been no systematic body of research that has evolved over time. This book aims to invigorate, excite, and expand the literature on boundary spanning in a diverse range of disciplines such as sociology, organizational psychology, management, medicine, defence, health, social work, and community services. The book serves as the first collection of reviews on boundary spanning in organizations.

This edited book addresses two critical issues in international management: building trust and managing boundary spanning activities between international business partners. The duel-process of internationalization of multinational corporations (MNCs), through globalisation and regionalisation, has helped MNCs to increase their market expansion and improve the capabilities of innovation and learning. By creating various forms of international strategic alliances (ISAs), MNCs have become structurally more complex and geographically more dispersed. As a result, MNCs in general and ISAs in particular face the challenges of discerning blurred organisational boundaries, reconfiguring the control mechanisms, integrating diversified resources, and coordinating distributed activities in time and space. Research in organisation behaviour indicates that boundary spanners play critical yet unspecified roles and functions in managing cross-boundary relationships. A core boundary spanning function is to build trust relationships. When organisations engage in business transactions, members of the organisations are concerned with not only the outcomes of economic transactions but also the processes of social exchanges. Boundary spanners may succeed in building interpersonal trust in a partnership, nonetheless their effort may not lead to inter-partner trust without an effective implementation of the institutionalisation process. Whereas trustworthiness is the antecedent to trust providing the basis for trust to develop, distrust manifests itself as a separate and linked concept to trust. These dynamic features of trust, trustworthiness, and distrust are critically elaborated. Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management is dedicated to explicating these under-researched themes and contributing to the emerging streams of research in micro foundations and micro-structural approaches. It illustrates the latest research on the topic and will be of interest to both students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of organisational behaviour and theory, strategic management, international strategy and strategic alliances.

Although researchers and practitioners have long claimed a relationship between group process and performance, results of studies actually testing that relationship have been equivocal (Goodman, 1986). There seems to be little concrete evidence that intervening to improve a group's process actually enhances performance (Kaplan, 1979). Nor does it seem that general models of group behavior allow us to understand why some groups are more effective than others (Goodman, 1986; Hackman & Morris, 1975). Three factors appear to contribute to these equivocal results. First, models of group process often have failed to address the complete range of group behaviors, particularly those that describe how members of the group interact with others external to the group (Ancona, 1988). Second, researchers have often failed to take into account differences in the tasks that groups must complete (Goodman, 1986). Different tasks clearly require different processes for high performance (Herold, 1979). Third, researchers have often used global frameworks that are very general to predict performance rather than producing fine-grained models with clear variables and operational measures (Goodman, Ravlin, & Schminke, 1987). Together, these three factors may explain why group process often fails to covary with the performance of groups operating within organizations. Since the tasks of many groups within organizations require interdependent action, failure to consider the external interactions required and the lack of inclusive, fine-grained models of group process make it unlikely that the appropriate process variables related to performance will be measured...

This breakthrough volume details the psychological and interpersonal skills needed to meet the practical challenges of building, developing, adapting, training, and managing multicultural global teams. Its self-regulation approach offers cognitive keys to understanding and embracing difference and its associated complexities for successful global collaborations and lasting results. From this foundation, the book moves on to the various roles of leadership in facilitating team process, from establishing trust to defusing conflicts, reducing biases, and using feedback effectively. This synthesis of research and practice effectively blends real-world experience and the science of global team leadership to address the complex issues facing modern organizations. Core skills covered by the book: Structuring successful global virtual teams. Developing cross-cultural competencies through global teams. Managing active faultlines and conflicts in global teams. Coaching global teams and global team leaders. Utilizing feedback effectively across cultures. Meeting the global need for leaders through Guided Mindfulness. Leading Global Teams is mind-opening reading for students, scholars, and practitioners in industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, work psychology, and applied psychology programs looking for the most current research and best practices regarding its timely subject.

Innovation requires teaming. (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.

Doz and Kosonen ask the question, Why do some companies fail to adapt to change, while others thrive on change, disruption, and discontinuity? This book shows business owners how to develop strategic agility, so that a company is always up-to-speed and ahead of their competitors.