Bridging the Boundary, External Process and Performance in Organizational Teams (Classic Reprint) - Tapa dura

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Excerpt from Bridging the Boundary, External Process and Performance in Organizational Teams

Although groups have always been an important tool for accomplishing organizational goals, the form and use of groups is changing rapidly. In response to the accelerating pace of technological and market change, organizations are frequently delegating more responsibility to temporary teams than they have in the past. Furthermore, organizational units often have to be more closely coupled than in the past, sometimes even working in parallel to complete assignments spanning traditional organizational units (Clark Fujimoto, 1987; Henderson & Clark, 1990). Thus work group members must frequently interact extensively with non-team members to complete their assignments. As this trend continues, organizational groups can not be viewed as bounded units: rather they must be viewed as open systems interacting with other groups or individuals in the organizational environment. Despite the importance of such externally dependent teams, relatively little research has explored how they interact with other groups and how those interactions can facilitate the accomplishment of their assigned tasks.

Over the past half century social psychologists have devoted substantial attention to the fine-grained analysis of behavior within groups. Many frameworks exist for that analysis including models of group decision making (Bourgeois Eisenhardt, 1988; Isenberg, 1986; Nemeth, 1986), task and maintenance activities (Bales, 1983; Benne Sheats, 1948;Schein, 1988), norm development (Bettenhausen Murnighan, 1985), and evolution (Gersick, 1988, 1989)to name a few. The emphasis in previous research on what goes on within the group has been so strong that definitions of group process have described it solely in terms of the interactions among group members that transform resources into a product (Goodman, 1986; Hackman Morris, 1975). Gladstein (1984) found, however, that group process entailed both internal group process and boundary managment. Both internal and external components are thought to be necessary to predict the perfomiance to these new organization teams.

The purpose of this research is to examine the relatively unknown pattern of groups external activities with essential others.

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