Boundary-Spanning Employees and Relationships with External Stakeholders: A Social Identity Approach

Abstract

Boundary-spanning employees can have a substantial impact on organizational performance based on the relationships they build with external stakeholders. Yet there is currently no theoretical lens through which to understand the nature of—and psychological contributors to—these employee-stakeholder relationships at the individual level. Drawing on social identity theory, the proposed framework reveals that when an employee identifies strongly with the organization, this affects the way the employee views external stakeholders in the social landscape at work, resulting in some surprising consequences. Specifically, when organizational identification is heightened, an employee’s engagement with external stakeholders will paradoxically become more adversarial and less collaborative. This effect can be attenuated, or even reversed, to the extent that (a) the employee construes that the stakeholder is an organizational member and (b) the organization’s identity orientation is collectivistic. The proposed framework also reveals antecedents to an employee’s construal of a stakeholder’s membership in the organization—antecedents that are unique to the boundary-spanning context.

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