This research project explores the phenomenon of "blurred boundaries" in organizational work teams. "Blurred boundaries" occurs when members of a collective are unclear or disagree about their membership (i.e., it is unclear who is part of their team or group). Consider this scenario when asking University faculty members in a Management department who is in their department. Some respondents included only full-time tenure-track faculty members while others also included part-time adjunct faculty who regularly attend department meetings. Some respondents included management-major core faculty while others included faculty teaching in the management-major, business ethics, and information technology areas. Finally, one member included staff members and student workers while others did not.

A lack of clarity about where a team or group “begins and ends” is increasingly common in today’s business organizations. Confusion may arise when team members are members of multiple work teams simultaneously or when team memberships change frequently in response to unexpected environmental conditions. "Blurred boundaries" presents a significant practical challenge for work teams, making it difficult to achieve the desired levels of clarity, coordination, and communication within the team or between the team and other parties in its environment (Friedlander, 1987; Hackman, 2002). As anecdotal evidence of the prevalence of this phenomenon, during my prior data collection efforts examining other team-level phenomena, I (the first author) was repeatedly surprised by how frequently team members were confused about who was on their team(s) and/or disagreed with other team members on their team’s size and composition. Spending time and effort defining team boundaries and clarifying team membership became a necessary starting point for progressing the research studies.

Scholarly discussions about unclear team boundaries are present in classic writings about the ecology of work teams (e.g., Friedlander, 1987) and more recently include a recognition of the reality and challenges associated with “blurred boundaries” in today’s fluid and dynamic organizations (e.g., Marrone, 2010; Mortensen & Haas, 2018; Tannenbaum et al, 2012; Wageman et al., 2008). However, the state of the research on “blurred boundaries” remains largely conceptual and preliminary in nature. Measuring "blurred boundaries" is complicated, and the phenomenon is elusive. As such, scholars are calling for additional research to focus on assessing "blurred boundaries" directly and understanding the phenomenon more fully (e.g., Mortensen & Haas, 2018; Tannenbaum et al., 2012).

In the current research, we have responded to these calls by collecting quantitative data to directly assess the level of "blurred boundaries” in teams. Team leaders and members of 81 organizational work teams across different organizations and industries were asked to report on their team size and to list the names of the team members in their respective teams. Measurement of “team boundedness agreement” and relationships among “team boundedness agreement” and other factors, such as team type, use of team rosters, disruptive events in the organization, access to resources, boundary spanning, emotional identification, team leadership, team performance and viability, will be presented.