The Duality of Boundary Spanning after Downsizing: A Resource Allocation Perspective.

Teams frequently establish and maintain relationships with other teams to manage joint work and obtain external resources. Such "boundary spanning" can be beneficial or detrimental for teams. Nevertheless, prior research has largely focused on the benefits that teams draw from boundary-spanning activities without addressing potentially negative effects. To address this issue, we draw from resource allocation theory to examine when and why boundary spanning benefits and harms team performance. Specifically, we propose that when teams face strongly reduced staffing budgets, boundary spanning helps to replenish team resources, which then benefits team performance. By contrast, when teams face smaller reductions in staffing budgets, we suggest that boundary spanning diverts finite available time and attention from other crucial activities, thereby depleting team resources and hurting team performance. We test this moderated mediation relationship using time-lagged, multi-source data from a healthcare organization that had reduced staffing budgets without lowering output requirements. Corroborating our expectations, our results illustrate that reductions in team staffing budgets critically shape boundary spanning's implications for teams' resources availability and performance. Our research, thereby, adds value by offering a more complete and integrated perspective on the performance implications of boundary spanning that complements the one-sided, and overly optimistic, view within much existing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]