The impact of Simmelian informal boundary spanning bridges on leadership emergence

Abstract

Organizations have recognized that effective leadership emergence is a source of competitive advantage and have begun investing heavily in leadership development efforts. At the same time, organizations are increasingly employing team-based structures that create demands for adaptive inter-team coordination. Because of these two developments, informal boundary spanning between teams has increasingly become a dynamic, bottom-up activity where individuals who may not have formal authority step up and take on emergent leadership roles based on such activities. In this study, we examine how leadership emergence is affected by two different types of embedded (i.e., Simmelian) boundary spanning ti..