Effective collaboration within an organization is essential for improving performance and driving growth. However, employees often have connections outside their company, such as serving on the boards of rival companies, participating in industry committees, or being active in social or political causes.
A new study published in Strategic Management Journal suggests that such affiliations with external organizations may influence how well employees work together within their organization.
“Employees often have ties to organizations outside their main employer” explains Thorsten Grohsjean, the lead author of the study, who serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University. “Executives may serve on boards of other organizations, engineers may participate in standard-setting committees, and software programmers may moonlight on open-source projects. Extra-organizational affiliations may also be outside the professional domain: employees may be members of a church, supporters of a political party, or activists in a social movement. We suggest that such extra-organizational affiliations may have the unintended side effect of hindering intraorganizational collaboration.”
Grohsjean, along with co-authors Henning Piezunka of the University of Pennsylvania and Maren Mickeler of ESSEC Business School, used data from five European professional men’s soccer leagues and the 2018 World Cup to study the impact of extra-organizational affiliations on collaboration. Professional soccer players who play for the same team in European leagues often represent competing national teams at the World Cup. This scenario mirrors what happens when employees in a company have outside affiliations with rival organizations.
The researchers identified two key conditions for external affiliations to affect collaboration within the organization: first, the employee must strongly identify with the external organization, and second, there must be significant competition between the two organizations. “Only if both conditions are met the competition between the two organizations affect the coworkers’ personal relationship,” notes Piezunka, an Associate Professor of Management at The Wharton Business School.
The study found that professional players in European soccer clubs collaborated less—indicated by fewer passes made to each other during games—after playing against each other as part of their respective national teams. “Our results suggest that players who faced a club teammate as a member of an opposing national team do indeed collaborate less with that teammate in the next season,” notes Mickeler, an Assistant Professor with a background in business administration.
For managers, the findings suggest that employees outside affiliations with competing organizations can pose challenges to collaboration. By understanding and managing these dynamics, managers can help employees work together more effectively and maintain strong internal collaboration.
