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

Theoretical background
Delbecq, 1978). More specifically, Leifer and Delbecq (ibid.) suggest that
the requirements for boundary spanning activities are likely to increase in
situations where the organization has diverse or unclear goals, an uncertain
technology is utilized, and when the required information cannot be
procured (at a reasonable cost) from the internal memory of the
organization. Emerging change programs may demonstrate all these
properties. Furthermore, the findings by Ratcheva (2009) suggest that
projects (and programs) with high levels of complexity demonstrate greater
requirements for multidisciplinary knowledge integration and thus higher
levels of involvement of external parties.
The boundaries of change programs or other temporary organizations
guiding change have not received much attention within the literature on
organizational change, either. Although change management literature has
not explicitly addressed the boundary that emerges between the guiding
team and the rest of the organization, it has more indirectly acknowledged
the potential gap between the advocates of change, i.e. active change agents,
and the recipients of the change effort. Correspondingly, many of the
presented intervention techniques, participation methods, and suggested
forms of communication in the change management literature (e.g. Bryson
& Anderson, 2000; Kotter, 1995) can be interpreted as boundary crossing
activities between the change leaders and the change recipients. Also the
need for isolative activities has been briefly acknowledged (Partington,
2000; Stoddard & Jarvenpaa, 1995).
Since a contextual view to change programs is adopted in this study, it is
worthwhile to emphasize that boundary spanning is a contextual activity:
the types and amounts of boundary activity vary from context to context
(Ancona, 1990; Ancona & Caldwell, 1988; At-Twaijri & Montanari, 1987;
Choi, 2002; Gladstein, 1984; Russ et al., 1998). Antecedents of boundary
activities can be found at multiple levels, including the organization level,
program level and individual level. Organization-level antecedents of
boundary activities include issues such as multi-team membership, i.e., the
extent to which people are engaged in several teams simultaneously, the
level of openness in the operations and the extent to which the organization
is linked to its stakeholders (Ancona & Caldwell, 1988). Studies relying on
the information processing perspective have frequently linked
environmental uncertainty to the amount of required boundary activity (At-
Twaijri & Montanari, 1987; Leifer & Delbecq, 1978), and issues such as
organizational structures, informal processes and overall organizational
climate have also been identified as possible antecedents of a team’s
boundary spanning activity (Joshi, Pandey, & Han, 2009).
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