Trust Building and Boundary Spanning in Cross-Border Management

3Boundary Spanning in ISAs

A Trust Perspective

Michael W. Zhang and Paul Gooderham

3.1 Introduction

A core concern within the field of international management is that of coordination across business units within large organisations. Even when taking into account cultural and institutional distance, the very creation of boundaries is in itself a source of friction. Dasi et al. (2017) find that not only is the amount of knowledge sharing affected by boundaries, but that inter-unit relations are significantly more extrinsic in character than intra-organisational relations. While trust can be relatively readily developed within an organisation, its development across organisational boundaries is significantly more arduous. In recent years there ...