Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2020, Organizational Behavior

Firms are challenged to achieve organizational goals in an environment of increasingly decentralized information. Cross-functional project teams are employed widely as a strategy to facilitate better coordination, yet projects still fail at a rate of 31% per year. Communication is a leading cause of failure. While inter-team communication has been studied extensively, less is understood about the intra-team communication of a cross-functional project team. The main finding of our study is that the success of a cross-functional team is dependent on the team's ability to inquire across multiple knowledge boundaries in a way that develops an awareness of each other's functional identity. Functional identity is defined as the norms and practices of a functional team which represent how they think about and prioritize their work. Whether or not this functional-identity knowledge-sharing process occurs determines whether a cross-functional team is able to construct a shared reality with respect to the projects' goals and priorities. Achieving a shared reality is what enables a team to perform successfully. We call the understanding of another's functional identity, constructed through a process of inquiry by the project team's members, their achievement of interpretive symmetry. Our findings are from an integrated mixed-methods study. Qualitative results from Study 1 began with the consideration that cross-functional team members live in two social worlds, that of the project team and that of their own functional team. Boundaries on a project exist both from a knowledge and a social membership perspective. Therefore, team members must engage in a process of inquiry across these boundaries. We found that successful teams have a receptive awareness that the project team does not “know” and needs to learn. This receptivity supported the team members in their open inquiry with one another and the sharing of not only functional knowledge but functional identity. Exposing t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Boland (Committee Chair); Phil Cola (Advisor); David Aron (Advisor); Yunmei Wang (Advisor) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Behavioral Sciences; Business Administration; Business Community; Cognitive Psychology; Communication; Information Technology; Management; Organization Theory; Organizational Behavior; Philosophy of Science; Social Psychology; Social Research; Social Structure; Sociology; Sustainability; Technology