Keeping Friends Close and Enemies Closer: How Competitors Influence Team Boundary Spanning

In this article we investigate the influence of competitive relationships between innovation teams on emerging boundary spanning patterns between them. Focusing on the individual team member, we discuss how dyadic perceptions shape the selection of interaction partners and the subsequent flow of information between teams. We furthermore highlight that the boundary spanning targets matter when evaluating boundary spanning effectiveness and not only the fact that it occurs. In conducting a longitudinal study of competing student innovation teams (n = 42 teams, n = 157 individuals) we find – counter to intuitively expected avoidance behaviors – that team members maintain knowledge exchange with alters whom they perceive as competitors. We furthermore observe that the best performing teams actively included competitors in their boundary spanning networks.