The Effects Of Behavioral Integration And Boundary Management On Team Effectiveness In Knowledge Worker Team

Nowadays, the use of teams has increased dramatically in response tocompetitive challenges and organizational needs in most of organizations. Knowledgeworkers are one of the fastest growing segments of the workforce. Knowledge workerteam often faces the complex task and more interaction among team members who arethe people has different specialized skills and training. Fewer studies have examinedthe effectiveness of knowledge worker team despite they work differently than otherwork teams of employees. Traditional researches on team effectiveness tend to treatteams as closed systems separated from their environment. This study holds boththeoretical and practical merits, which examined the relationships between teameffectiveness and team process taking both the internal and external perspective,theorized on the extent to which individual-, team-, and organization-leveldeterminants shape team process.A range of published works on Behavioral Integration, team boundary spanningand Team effectiveness is reviewed. Based on it, a model is established in the core ofteam composition, team context, organizational context, team process and teameffectiveness. Using survey data from questionnaire investigation processing withSPSS19.0and AMOS17.0statistics software, the paper draws the followingconclusions.Firstly, using an open system perspective，the present model contributes to theteam literature by identifying antecedents of behavioral integration, team boundaryspanning with respect to their effects on team effectiveness. Results from empiricalstudy reveal support for the hypothesis that both team processes are positivelyassociated with team effectiveness. Correlation analysis shows the complexity of therelationships between internal process and external process, and no significantrelationships between them are found.Secondly, the study divides the team process into the internal process andexternal process，chooses and verifies the variable to describe the process. Internalprocess study extends Hambrick’s concept of behavioral integration from topmanagement team to knowledge worker team. Empirical data verifies the dimensions, measurement items and reliability. And the external process study presents themanagement ability of team boundary spanning based on the capabilities perspectiveand proposes three kinds of abilities to measure external interaction from developing,managing and applying external tie.Finally, the study specifies team composition, team-level andorganizational-level contextual antecedents of behavioral integration and teamboundary spanning and outlines the contingencies shaping the effective team. It’s thefirst time to study the determinants of team boundary spanning using empirical study.The study extends the deterninants of behavioral integration. Result showsdeterminants at each level explained the internal and external process differently.The framework developed here provides support for future research on effectivenessin knowledge worker team.