باز کردن تاثیر وابستگی به تیم های پروژه در رفتارهای مرزبندی  Unpacking the impact of attachment to project teams on boundary-spanning behaviors

1. Introduction Effective teamwork is a critical success factor for project performance in the engineering and construction industry (Yang et al., 2011) and has a strong connection to financial and non-financial benefits (Chou and Yang, 2012). To achieve project efficiency, project teams increasingly rely on communications and collaborations across team boundaries (Bond-Barnard et al., 2013). Boundary spanning, or boundary management, refers to project team members’ efforts to operate external linkages from within an organization (e.g., across marketing and manufacturing teams) or across organizational boundaries (e.g., to external customers, suppliers) (Ancona, 1990; Marrone, 2010). As the business environment becomes even more competitive, individual team members need to venture beyond team boundaries to seize innovation opportunities (Crawford and Lepine, 2013). Nevertheless, some team members boundary-span less extensively, isolating themselves and their project teams from external environments. Our study aims to unpack project team members’ behavior especially to propose a model that predicts who will be better (or worse) boundary spanners on their teams’ behalf, based on attachment to project teams. The purpose of our research is to elucidate project team members’ relational orientations that facilitate (or hamper) their externally focused behavior, along with shedding light on underlying psychological mechanisms. The extant literature has mostly focused on performance outcomes of external activities, documenting that broader ranges of boundary spanningenhance the team’s performance (Ancona and Caldwell, 1992; Somech and Khalaili, 2014). In contrast, prior research has paid less attention to antecedents of externally focused behavior (Choi, 2002; Brion et al., 2012). Especially, boundary spanners need to deal with interpersonal relationships and project environments inside and outside their teams (Friedman and Podolny, 1992; Qu and Cheung, 2013). Understanding project team members’ relational orientation—that is, how they perceive project environments and interact with others—is critical in this context but remains largely unaddressed in project teams and boundaryspanning behavior research. Our study thus contributes to a current knowledge by applying group attachment theory (Smith et al., 1999) to understand how project team members’ relational orientations influence their boundary-spanning behavior. Group attachment is an individual-level construct based on an individual’s perception of his or her relationship to the specific group as a whole (Lee, 2005; Lee and Ling, 2007) and provides a psychological foundation of team boundary management. Our proposed model (Fig. 1) may help explain why some project team members excel while others derail tasks and teams in external activities. Practically, management may use our results to predict the most (least) active boundary-spanners and form externally focused project teams, or choose ideal team representatives. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, we review group attachment theory and its relevance to project team members’ boundary-spanning behaviors. We then propose two psychological mechanisms (perceived intergroup competition and construed external image of the project team) as mediators between group attachment and team member boundary-spanning behaviors. The key hypotheses are then developed and follow with methodology, results, and analysis explanation. Finally, the discussion and implications are presented.