The Role of Boundary Work in the Prediction of Performance and Resilience: A Fuzzy Set Configurational Perspective

As organisations continue to adopt flat and boundary-less structures, work teams must increasingly direct attention to the management of cross-boundary relationships. Boundary work, defined as a collection of external team processes, is thus an important phenomenon because it reflects activities that facilitate effective cross-boundary interactions. However, a reliance on correlational research methods has contributed to a narrow perspective of the role of boundary work, which neglects the importance of how and when specific boundary work behaviours combine to achieve outcomes. Therefore, this study seeks to extend the understanding of the role of boundary work by demonstrating how and when boundary work behaviours combine to predict high (and low) performance and resilience at both the team- (i.e., performed collectively by all team members) and individual-level (i.e., performed by team members on behalf of the team) of analysis. The study also explores how different boundary work configurations predict performance and resilience under different conditions of team demographic diversity (i.e., average tenure and gender diversity) and work context information (i.e., resource scarcity, inter-team task interdependence, team task complexity, and requirements uncertainty). A configurational approach and Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) were employed to examine data from twelve software development teams (study 1) and one hundred and seventy-five software and product developers (study 2). The results indicate multiple configurations of boundary work behaviour that predict high (and low) team performance and team resilience, individual performance, but not individual resilience. Moreover, team boundary reinforcement is identified as the most important behaviour for the prediction of high team performance and team resilience. The findings also suggest that work context factors can help explain when boundary work configurations predict performance and resilience. Theoretical implications are discussed.