Phys.org October 12, 2022
Drawing upon the notion of boundaryless organizations and upon the information processing perspective of organizational design a team of researchers in the US (University of South Florida, University of Nebraska, University of Missouri) investigated the decompartmentalization of internal communication as a unique organizational context that moderates the relationship between R&D employees’ exploration behaviors and their individual inventive performance. They tested their hypotheses using a novel combination of survey and archival data. They found that R&D employees who explored more generated inventions that were more valuable only when in workplaces characterized by high communication decompartmentalization. Such workplaces had more frequent communication between R&D and other units, more employee mobility via cross-unit project rotations, or greater managerial support for decompartmentalization. According to the researchers their findings suggested the importance of communication decompartmentalization, especially for companies that need employees to engage in exploration…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE