Globally networked: intraorganizational boundary spanning in the global organization

Multinational corporations (MNCs) need to sense, source, and mobilize knowledge when and where it arises,whether at home, or elsewhere in the world. For this reason, MNCs benefit from employee networks of re-lationships that span across intraorganizational barriers, allowing for the efficient mobilization of knowledgeacross boundaries. Yet, which organizational members are more likely to be able to develop these boundaryspanning networks? We leverage a unique data set from a large multinational corporation to empirically test acomprehensive model that captures the effect of an employee’s mandate, expertise, and behavioral orientationson her likelihood to span intraorganizational boundaries that manifest themselves in the form of hierarchies,intra-functional domains, and geographic territories. Wefind that the employees that are more likely to beboundary spanners are those having mandates with a global impact, high levels of expertise, and a collaborativeorientation in their networking behaviors. In addition, wefind that these effects are stronger for those employeesthat have large formal workflow networks