Research On The Impact Of Team Boundary-spanning Activity On Team Innovation Performance

With a new normal economy and continuous upgrading of industrial structure, innovation has become one of the important themes of the times. Meanwhile, in the construction of collaborative innovation system, it is particularly necessary for the research and development team to carry out boundary spanning activities. And at the theoretical level, as more and more studies began to use open systems perspective to study the issue of team innovation, boundary spanning activities has also attracted a great deal of attention. Boundary spanning activities is widespread in organizational activities, team boundary spanning activities can be defined as the activities that team keep contact with units embedded in the external environment and manage interaction actions to between them in order to achieve performance. Related studies have shown that the team boundary spanning activities can better improve innovation performance than the team internal process. This study attempts provide a more complete answer for the core problem that how R&D team boundary spanning activities affect team innovation performance. By surrounding the key issue, we did an in-depth research on the mediating role of external knowledge sharing and the moderating role of boundary role fluidity and boundary role flexibility in order to strive to reveal the black box between team boundary spanning activities and team innovation performance.Therefore, this study proposed and addressed the following three questions:(1) Are external oriented activities certainly beneficial for team innovation? Or whether the team boundary spanning activities will be able to enhance team innovation performance?(2) How team boundary spanning activities affects the team innovation performance? Whether team external knowledge sharing played a mediating role between team boundary spanning activities and team innovation performance?(3) What are the boundary conditions of influence that team boundary spanning activities on innovation performance in the team-environment interface? That is whether boundary role fluidity and boundary role flexibility play a moderating role or not. Based on the above issues and the related fields, this research built an inverted U-shaped model of team boundary spanning activities affect team innovation performance. Based on104R&D team sample data, this study uses empirical research method to verify all of the hypotheses. After the findings were fully discussed, this study proposed theoretical contribution. Those findings are help to deepen and enrich perspectives and theoretical research about team boundary spanning activities, and can provide inspiration for the development of the management team boundary management practices.On one hand, the first innovation of this study was verified the inverted U-shaped affect of team boundary spanning activities on team innovation performance and discovered the mediating role played by team external knowledge sharing, thereby opening the "black box"; on the other hand, the boundary conditions of team boundary spanning activities on team innovation performance were fully explored and the moderating role in the two stages were also verified. Overall, this study integrates the behavior perspective and the structure perspective into the area team boundary spanning activities, which also has a certain degree of innovation.