Boundary Spanning
Coordination across a boundary doesn’t require dissolving the boundary, it requires someone whose real function, assigned or not, is carrying information and trust across it.
What Is It?
Once boundaries exist, and every growing organization develops them, the question changes. The goal is no longer preventing boundaries. It’s deciding how work crosses them.
Every organization has people who seem to know everyone. They aren’t necessarily managers. They rarely own the process they’re helping move. Yet when work gets stuck between two teams, everyone already knows who to call.
Organizational researchers call these people boundary spanners. Michael Tushman coined the term and ran the seminal research on boundary-spanning individuals, particularly in R&D and innovation settings, in a 1977 Academy of Management Review paper and a 1979 Academy of Management Journal study. Both built on Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn’s foundational 1966 work, The Social Psychology of Organizations, which first identified that organizations need dedicated roles to manage their interface with whatever lies outside their own boundary, whether that outside is a market, a regulator, or simply the department down the hall.
In practice, a boundary spanner is rarely a title. Ask any group a simple question, when you’re stuck on a problem that crosses a departmental line, who do you actually go to, and the same handful of names tend to surface, repeatedly, independent of seniority. Those are the people doing the work: not managing both sides, but trusted by both sides enough to move an idea from one group’s language into a form the other group can actually use. Reporting lines move authority. Boundary spanners move work.
Why Does It Matter?
An organization with tightly clustered, locally specialized teams doesn’t need to flatten that clustering to get fast, organization-wide information flow. It needs a small number of well-placed long-range connections doing the cross-cutting work. That’s a narrower and cheaper intervention than the one most organizations reach for by default, forcing broader contact through more meetings, matrix reporting, or blanket mandates to “collaborate more,” all of which spend real coordination cost without necessarily reaching the specific boundary that’s actually the problem.
The stakes are not abstract. Patients moving from emergency care to cardiology to surgery cross several organizational boundaries in a single stay. Reviews of serious preventable patient harm consistently find failures at those handoffs, not clinical incompetence, among the leading causes. When hospitals redesign those transitions deliberately, treating the boundary itself as something to engineer rather than trusting it to take care of itself, preventable harm falls. The clinicians on either side of the handoff weren’t the variable. The boundary between them was.
What Changes Once You See It?
You stop asking how to get two teams to collaborate more, a question that implies everyone needs a little more contact with everyone else, and start asking who is already doing this work informally, and whether that’s a deliberate, resourced function or an accident that depends entirely on one person’s goodwill.
You start treating the loss of a boundary spanner as a structural risk, not a routine personnel change. Some keystone employees create value because they hold rare technical expertise. Others create value because they’re the only reliable bridge between otherwise disconnected parts of the organization, and that second kind is easy to overlook until the bridge is already gone. The same efficiency that makes a few long-range connections so valuable also makes them a concentrated point of failure: most of an organization’s cross-cutting reach can run through a small number of people, which means losing one costs far more than losing an average team member ever would.
You also stop assuming a cross-functional title predicts who the real boundary spanners are. Title doesn’t track trust. One reliable way to find them is to ask the question directly and see whose name keeps coming up; a look at who actually emails, messages, or meets with whom across boundaries will often surface the same names.
Common Misunderstandings
- It is not the same as a manager who has formal authority over both groups. A boundary spanner’s leverage is trust-based, not positional. Giving someone authority over two teams doesn’t automatically make them a working bridge, and a working bridge doesn’t require that authority to function.
- It does not mean every team needs its own dedicated boundary-spanning role. The value comes from a small number of well-placed connections doing disproportionate work, not from staffing a bridge at every possible seam.
- It is not automatically healthy. A connection that only carries information in one direction, or that decides what crosses and who benefits from it, has stopped being a bridge and become a gate. The fix for a gate isn’t reinforcing it, it’s making its exclusivity costly.
- It is not a substitute for asking why the boundary is expensive to cross in the first place. A boundary spanner compensates for distance between groups. It doesn’t remove the reasons that distance exists.
Diagnostic Question
When someone here gets stuck on a problem that crosses a team boundary, who do they actually go to, and what happens to that connection if that person leaves?
Explore Further
Field Notes
Related Field Guide
Origin
Michael Tushman coined the term and conducted the seminal empirical research on boundary-spanning individuals, particularly in R&D and innovation contexts (Academy of Management Review, 1977; Academy of Management Journal, 1979), building on Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn’s foundational 1966 book The Social Psychology of Organizations.