Agenda

This event is part of VSM Lectures, a series of seminars by top scholars from renowned international universities and institutions. Invited speakers present their recent studies, share key findings, and explore the impact of their research on the challenges currently faced by society and organizations.

The effects of piqued curiosity on boundary spanning networking in organizations

VSM lecture held by Tiziana Casciaro - Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Rotman School of Management and holder of the Marcel Desautels Chair in Integrative Thinking at the University of Toronto

*The event will also be available online.  

Abstract: 

Despite the demonstrated importance of spanning formal and network boundaries for organizational functioning, organizations routinely struggle to facilitate interactions across boundaries, when and where needed. To address this tension, we introduce a dynamic view of boundary spanning as motivated not just by stable structural arrangements and individual predispositions, but also by temporary situational cues that induce shortlived boundary-spanning networking. We focus on situational cues that highlight a gap between current and desired knowledge, and thus pique curiosity and the drive to learn by engaging with individuals from groups that are not one’s own and are disconnected from one another. With data from a large-scale randomized controlled trial involving 2,275 middle managers in a major financial services corporation, we corroborate the predicted causal effect of piqued curiosity on boundary-spanning networking. Two additional experiments substantiate the drive to learn as the causal mechanism and establish that piquing curiosity motivates people to network across (versus within) boundaries. The findings document the transient nature of boundaryspanning networking and curiosity as an impetus for it, introducing the potential to achieve integration while also enabling an organization to adapt dynamically to changing task environments.