The Role of National Identity Salience for Drawbacks of Boundary Spanning Across National Cultures

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Research on boundary spanning has highlighted its detrimental effect for boundary spanners themselves. However, in particular, the underlying mechanism through which employees’ boundary spanning affects their role overload remains largely unexplored. Building upon identity theory, we investigate the role of employees’ national identity salience in explaining the relationship between boundary spanning across national cultures and role overload. For this purpose, we conducted an experience sampling study and applied multilevel modeling to test our hypothesized moderated mediation model based on 561 observations from 104 individuals working in multinational contexts. Our findings show that the detrimental effect of boundary spanning across national cultures on role overload is mediated by employees’ national identity salience. Furthermore, our results reveal that this indirect effect is contingent on the boundary spanners’ national identity plurality such that this effect is more detrimental for individuals with high national identity plurality than for individuals with low national identity plurality. These findings have valuable implications for both boundary-spanning and multiculturalism research.