Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Discussion
and resource seeking has been identified in the context of self-managing
work teams, referred to as persuading activities (Druskat & Wheeler, 2003).
The findings of the current study also provide support for the findings of
Balogun and her colleagues (Balogun et al., 2005) concerning the boundary
activities of internal change agents in the attempt to enroll others to their
change cause. The activities of aligning agendas, selling, managing up, and
lobbying reported by Balogun et al. all fall under the category of
legitimating and committing activities, as defined in the current study.
The differences between the present findings and previous research can
be largely explained by the specific focus of the current study: the
temporary nature of the program organization, the parent organization’s
role as the client or target of the change, and the focus on the initiation
phase of the program. Firstly, the findings suggest that change programs as
emerging organizations require boundary setting: when a change program
is initiated, its position and boundaries need to be defined, explaining the
occurrence of positioning activities. Similarly, Yan and Louis (1999) employ
the term bringing up boundaries to refer to activities that lead to the
emergence of a work unit’s boundaries. Secondly, linking activities have not
been reported as a separate boundary activity type in the previous studies.
The occurrence of these activities can be explained by the novelty of the
program organization, as linking activities contribute to defining the
relationship between the program and its parent organization by describing
dependencies and establishing communication and collaboration channels.
Finally, influencing activities, as defined in the current study, have not
come up in the previous studies. While the program is supposed to deliver a
change in the parent organization as its end result, the recently established
change program may already have effects on the parent organization and
these effects may not necessarily be related to the program’s main task and
its eventual effects. This finding further supports the notion of the
contextuality of temporary organizations (e.g. Engwall, 2003; Pellegrinelli
et al., 2007) by demonstrating how change programs can have early and
even unintentional effects.
As discussed in the Methodology and Results chapters (chapters 4 and 5),
the division of boundary activities into distinct types is not an unambiguous
task. The examples provided in section 3.5 show how the same actual action
may be interpreted as a demonstration of different boundary activity types,
depending on the context. Also, the analysis showed that an activity often
includes more than one intention, indicating that an action may
simultaneously represent more than one type of boundary activity. Instead
of aiming to provide an absolute, unambiguous division of the boundary
activity types at the program-parent organization boundary, the current
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