Global Team Boundary Complexity: A Social Network Perspective

In this paper we propose and develop a "global team boundary complexity" construct based on coordination and complexity theories, to quantify the complexity of the global collaboration environment, from a coordination perspective. The construct contains four formative components: the number of boundary types spanned by the team, the actual number of boundaries spanned, the extent to which boundaries align, and the team member dispersion across these boundaries. We argue that each of these components increases the number of information cues the team needs to process to coordinate the task. We operationalize this measure using social network analysis methods, thus providing a nuanced approach to the study of global team coordination.