Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management

10Spanning the Boundary of Organisations

A Systematic Review of the Inter-Organisational Boundary-Spanning Literature

Ryan Tang, Xinlu Qiu, and Michael W. Zhang

10.1 Introduction

Challenges of globalisation and specialisation nowadays are stressing the need for organisations to manage geographically dispersed resources and functionally diverse activities. This need stimulates a growing volume of boundary-spanning (BS) research that reveals how organisations expand their boundaries via the inter-organisational BS in the globalised market with specialised capabilities. Inter-organisational BS indicates various communication and coordination activities performed by individuals between organisations which integrate activities across multiple cultural, ...