Boundary spanning: A leadership perspective

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier, Diane Boghrat and Susan Simkins.

What does boundary spanning in cross-disciplinary science teams entail, and how does it relate to leadership?

At its core, boundary spanning is about bridging differences. These differences usually fall into two categories:

1. Interdisciplinary differences, which involve varying perspectives across different disciplines, such as vocabulary, methods, epistemologies, and cultures.
2. Transdisciplinary differences, which involve perspectives from science, society, policy, and practice that transcend institutional and sectoral boundaries.

The expertise required to bridge these differences is often referred to as “integration expertise” (Hoffman et al., 2024) or as one of us (Simkins) refers to it “interdisciplinary translation.” For simplicity, we’ll refer to all these forms of expertise as “boundary spanning,” and those who play these roles as “boundary spanners.”

Boundary spanning is rarely recognized as a form of leadership. This oversight leaves significant gaps in leadership development for those who play these critical roles.

In this i2Insights contribution, we:

• Introduce enabling leadership as a form of leadership.
• Recognize boundary spanning as enabling leadership.
• Explore ways to better recognize, reward and support boundary-spanning roles.

Enabling Leadership

It is helpful to think about three types of leadership in cross-disciplinary science teams, adapted from complexity leadership theory (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007):

• Adaptive Leadership is centered on the creative and learning actions that drive experimentation, innovation, and novelty. This often relates to driving discovery of new knowledge. For example, a physicist collaborating with biologists and computer scientists is exercising adaptive leadership to develop new imaging technology.
• Administrative Leadership is tied to formal authority roles, such as directors, managers, and principal investigators. It is responsible for executing tasks that achieve goals and deliver outcomes. For example, a principal investigator managing a large research project ensures that resources are allocated, deadlines are met, and objectives are achieved.
• Enabling Leadership is about integrating differences between adaptive and administrative systems. Enabling leadership ensures that new ideas generated in the adaptive system are integrated into the administrative system, so that they are adopted and implemented effectively. In team science settings, enabling leadership can be seen as integrating interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary differences. For example, enabling leadership is demonstrated by a team member who facilitates discussions between an engineering researcher and a social scientist, ensuring that both understand each other’s terminology and can collaborate effectively.

One individual can exercise all three forms of leadership in a single meeting: providing strategic direction (administrative leadership), interpreting that direction from their disciplinary perspective (adaptive leadership), and incorporating diverse perspectives into decision-making (enabling leadership). In the complexity leadership paradigm, leadership is defined by individuals’ active participation in team activities, rather than by their formal titles or positions.

Boundary Spanning as Enabling Leadership

Boundary spanners exercise enabling leadership in bridging both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary differences:

1. Integrating Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Boundary spanners, such as interdisciplinary translators, facilitate understanding and communication by translating specialized jargon and technical language from one discipline into terms that are accessible to other team members. This translation is essential for integration in cross-disciplinary science.
2. Integrating Transdisciplinary Perspectives: Boundary spanners create a two-way feedback loop. They help integrate new scientific knowledge into broader operational systems—such as policy, practice, and societal change—while also gathering information from these systems to inform new cycles of scientific innovation. For example, a boundary spanner in a climate change research team might work with policymakers to ensure that the team’s findings are translated into actionable policies, while also bringing back policy challenges that the team can address in future research.

Despite the critical role of enabling leadership, it is often overlooked, and it is essential to create space for enabling leadership and boundary-spanning activities:

• Relative to adaptive leadership: While research activities and boundary-spanning for knowledge integration are interconnected, they are distinct. Boundary spanners, however, are frequently overshadowed by peers with strong technical expertise who excel in adaptive leadership. For example, in a team developing a new drug, the technical experts who designed the drug might receive most of the recognition, while the boundary spanners who facilitated collaboration between chemists, biologists, and regulatory experts may be underappreciated for their pivotal role. By clearly differentiating enabling leadership from adaptive leadership, we create space to honor and value both roles.
• Relative to administrative leadership: Many enabling leaders fear that engaging in boundary-spanning activities might disrespect administrative leaders. Questions often arise like “Am I stepping out of my bounds?” Sponsorship from administrative leaders can support enabling leadership, whether through public acknowledgment in team meetings, or formal recognition in performance evaluations.

Conclusions

Recognizing boundary spanning as an act of enabling leadership not only honors but also amplifies the unique value these activities bring to cross-disciplinary teams. By doing so, teams can cultivate and expand the boundary-spanning capacities essential for their success.

What strategies have you seen teams use to support and strengthen boundary-spanning efforts? How can teams create leadership development opportunities specifically for boundary spanners? And what other approaches have you seen that help teams meet their boundary-spanning needs in cross-disciplinary work?

References:

Hoffmann, S., Deutsch, L. and O’Rourke, M. (2024). Integration experts and expertise. In, F. Darbellay (Ed.), Elgar encyclopedia of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham, United Kingdom, pp. 273–276. (Online): https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035317967.ch60

Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R. and McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18, 4: 298–318. (Online): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)

Funding acknowledgement:

Funding for this work is provided by the National Science Foundation Award # 2118240 HDR Institute: Imageomics: A New Frontier of Biological Information Powered by Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning.

Biography: Gemma Jiang PhD is senior team scientist at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS) of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. She applies complexity leadership theory, social network analysis, and a suite of facilitation and coaching methods to enable cross-disciplinary science teams to converge upon solutions for challenges of societal importance.

Biography: Jenny Grabmeier MA is research strategist and facilitator at the Ohio State University (OSU) Translational Data Analytics Institute in Columbus, Ohio, USA. In her role she oversees research awards to catalyze new interdisciplinary, big data-enabled teams and projects; employs a variety of facilitation methods to support team ideation and strategic planning processes; and collaborates with other OSU institutes and entities to advance large-scale interdisciplinary research initiatives.

Biography: Diane Boghrat serves as the Managing Director for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Imageomics Institute and the NSF AI and Biodiversity Change Global Climate Center at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. As a scholar-practitioner in higher education, she specializes in applying psychosocial theories, organizational theory, and intersectionality to advance STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) research and education. Her work is centered on creating and managing complex multi- and interdisciplinary STEM initiatives, with a strong focus on building relationships, fostering community engagement, and ensuring operational success.

Biography: Susan Simkins (formerly Mohammed) PhD is a Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA and the Director of the TCaT (Teams, Cognition, and Time) research lab. For the past three decades, she has investigated the drivers of effective teamwork and performance, with an emphasis on team cognition, team composition/diversity, and temporal dynamics. As the Team Science Lead for the Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute, she merges science and practice by educating and consulting with team leaders and members on improving their team processes and outcomes.