Organizational Behavior Area Research Seminar Series: Bill McEvily
Bill McEvily
University of Toronto,
Rotman School of Management
Transient Boundary Spanning as a Connective Current in Organizations
Date: Friday, May 9, 2025
Time: 10:30 AM -12:00 PM
Location: Armstrong building, Room 155A
All are cordially invited to attend.
Abstract:
Despite the demonstrated importance of spanning formal and network boundaries, organizations routinely struggle to facilitate integrative interactions, when and where needed. To address this tension, we introduce a dynamic view of boundary spanning as motivated by not just stable patterns of interaction, but also episodic situational cues that highlight a gap between current and desired knowledge. We theorize that such knowledge gaps induce a state of curiosity, defined as the drive to learn, that prompts people to temporarily engage with individuals who are not only from other groups, but specifically with individuals who are socially distant (i.e., disconnected) from one another. With data from a large-scale randomized control trial involving 2,275 middle managers in a major financial services corporation, we corroborate the predicted causal effect of situational cues on transient boundary spanning. An additional experiment substantiates state curiosity (the drive to learn) as the causal mechanism and rules out alternative explanations. The findings document the transient nature of boundary spanning, and state curiosity as an impetus for it, introducing the potential to achieve integration while also enabling an organization to adapt dynamically to changing task environments.
