Help-seeking From Acquaintances:An Exploratory Case Study On Guanxi Spans Organizational Behavioral Boundary

With the limitation of resource, a growing number of companies are trying to break the internal organizational boundaries to respond to the changing market rapidly, to supply new products to meet the new needs of customers faster. In consideration of the complex and dynamic competition environment, exploring how organizational boundaries spanning are achieved inside the firm is both important to theoretical research of organizational boundary spanning and to the practice companies trying to maintain a sustainable growth.Organizations exist on the guanxi of organizational members. On the one hand, organizations can be conceptualized as guanxi among organizational members, organizational activities are embedded in guanxi activities. On the other hand, within the organizational everyday practice, the nature of inter-organizational interaction is guanxi interaction among members from different organizations, guanxi between members of different organizations are often established before the formation of formal relations between organizations, especially for the organization within China- a guanxi-based country. It's widespread that there being personal guanxi among members of different organizations within a company, when faced problems or tasks that cannot be completed within his/her own organization, following the guanxi-path to seek help from his/her acquaintances of other organizations are often preferred, involving them in situation of the task-completing or problem-solving, thus promoting the spanning of organizational boundaries. In this context, within the daily practice of enterprises, what is the behavioral mechanism that guanxi among members in different organizations spans the organizational boundary? In particular, the organization boundary within this paper are based on organizational behavioral theories, namely organizational behavioral boundaries.To do this, we explored the mechanism of organizational behavioral boundary spanning from the perspective of guanxi by simple-case study. The data comes from interviews and ethnographic research, we interviewed a private manufacturing enterprise for about one year in Linyi of Shandong province. Based on the data, we analyze them by grounded theory and discourse analysis. First, we encoded the interactional situations and interactional behaviors, to identify the behaviors that guanxi promote the spanning of the organizational behavioral boundary, then we analyzed the data that portrayed the real interactive conversation situation collected by field survey by discourse analysis. Then we found that, guanxi that crossing the organizational boundaries are established through introductions by acquaintances, situational interactions and continuous interactions; First order guanxi spans the organizational behavioral boundary through giving helps, initiative caring and helping secretly, second order guanxi spans the organizational behavioral boundary through giving direction, solving with him/her and solving for him/her. Research shows that guanxi among persons inside and outside organization can span organizational behavioral boundaries, thereby contributes to the continual growing of enterprises.