Boundary Spanners in the Orchestration of Resources: Global–local Complementarities in Action

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12321
• Author: David W. Versailles,Valérie Mérindol
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020

Boundary Spanners in the Orchestration of

Resources: Global–local Complementarities

in Action

VALÉRIE MÉRINDOL and DAVID W. VERSAILLES

Paris School of Business, newPIC chair

This research focuses on managerial roles and practices in the local–global deployment of the orchestration of

resources. We aim at understanding how local and global managers contribute to ‘sensing’,‘seizing’and

‘reconfiguring’in a transnational firm. We offer an exploratory, explanatory and theory-building case study and

an abductive methodgrounded in the microfoundations ofmanagerial activities. The field research develops inside

THALES business units. We obtain two main conclusions that are consistent with our abductive method: we

characterizehow the boundary-spanningfunction serves the orchestrationof resources and highlightthe importance

of team and network boundary-spanning modalities. We identify the complementarities between local and global

boundary spanners, and we show that rules create the framework suited to empowering the dynamics of team or

network boundary spanning at the local and global levels.

Keywords: dynamic capabilities; orchestration of resources; boundary spanners; transnational firms

Teece (2007: 1319) defines dynamic capabilities as

‘capabilities [that] can be harnessed to continuously create,

extend, upgrade, protect, and keep relevant the enterprise’s

unique asset base’. The process-based approach must take

into account two main attributes of dynamic capabilities

(Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Teece, 2007; Ambrosini

and Bowman, 2009; Adner and Kapport, 2010; Teece

et al., 1997): the ability to orchestrate resources and the

alignment of a firm’s internal drivers with the dynamics

of the business ecosystem.

In multinational firms, the orchestration of resources

materializes with the transfer or redeployment of local

competences and local practices to other units inside the

firm (Schreyögg and Kliesch-Eberl, 2007). However, the

replication of dynamic capabilities in multinational firms

represents a double challenge: such firms face important

market heterogeneities (Teece, 2014); routines are

embedded in local settings and address local market

specificities (Teece and Pisano, 1994; Szulanski, 1996).

Such firms evolve simultaneously in different business

ecosystems.According to Adner and Kapport(2010), they

confront different strategic interdependencies with local

stakeholders and different value creation processes. The

global–local dilemma emerges because the orchestration

of resources combines local operations with global

coordination (Augier and Teece, 2009). Teece (2014)

identified managerial complexity to simultaneously foster

local–globalcoordination and organizational flexibility. In

our article, we join this discussion from a perspective that

we believe is doubly relevant: in its salience in the

management of international firms and in its enhanced

understanding of the concept of dynamic capabilities.

Prahalad and Bettis(1986) and Kor and Mesko (2013)

have already discussed the dominant logic that covers

how managers conceptualize their business as well as

the drivers for decision making and resource allocation.

They assert that the dominant logic inside multinational

firms represents the main driver explaining the

propagation of routines and practices. Both of the above

papers introduce the reference to cognitive patterns and

explain how the replication process of dynamic

capabilities occurs inside multinational firms. Neither

article goes into the details of the orchestration of

resources from a managerial point of view, although

Prahalad and Bettis (1986) and Prahalad (2004) stress

the importance of representations of the world shared

throughout the organization or descriptions of how rules

and structures frame the execution of decisions and

assigned strategies. Teece (2007) explains that both the

sources of capabilities heterogeneity and the sources of

Correspondence: David W. Versailles, Paris School of Business,newPIC

chair, 59 rue Nationale, F-75013 Paris,France. E-mail dwv@newpic.fr

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12321

©2018 European Academy of Management

European Management Review, Vol. 17, –(2020)

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their replication lead to the establishment of a dominant

logic inside firms. However, he does not explain how

managerialcapabilities contributeto either the coexistence

of the heterogeneity or the propagation of capabilities

throughout multinational firms. He asserts that the

reproduction of best practices is less important than the

opportunity to w ork with managers who actuall ym obilize

resources, enforce rules, and implementagility, flexibility

and ingenuity. The purpose of our article is to understand

the rationales for the orchestration of resources from the

manager’s perspective.

We focus our investigation on a specific case of

multinational firms: the transnational model. In this

context, the orchestration of resources faces specific

challenges. This model implies nested coordination

modes between global and local managers (Bartlett

and Goshal, 1988; Teece, 2014). The levels of

interdependence are high, and the nature of coordination

remains specific (Kostova and Roth, 2003) because

transnational firms require various (vertical and

horizontal) flows of knowledge, products, and resources.

Such interdependencies remain complex to handle and

difficult to grasp. Coordination and interaction networks

have been identified as essential in the management of

transnational firms; however, the literature still under-

investigates the contribution of local and global

managerial capabilities to the orchestration of resources.

This article seeks to fill this gap.

This article focuses on managerial practices and the

manager’s role to understand how the local–global

deployment of dynamic capabilities occurs in

transnational firms. We analyze managers as boundary

spanners (Levina and Vaast, 2005; Hsiao et al., 2012) at

the global and local levels, and we explore their

interactions in terms of the actions of sensing, seizing

and reconfiguring described in the literature on dynamic

capabilities. We elaborate on the perspectives introduced

with the micro-foundations approach (Foss, 2009; Felin

et al., 2012; Barney and Felin, 2013). We investigate

collective and individual managerial capabilities and the

manager’s relationship to processes and structures.

This contribution is based on a casestudy on THALES:

a transnational company and a worldwide leader in

Defense, Security, aerospace, and transportation with a

large portfolio of products and clients. THALES emerges

from several European players in the defense and

aerospace industry with an initial focus on information

technologies, communications systems, and radar. The

project develops with interviews developed at the

corporate and business-unit levels. We compared several

activities that refer to the same managerial layout and

use similar managerial functions.

The article is organized in the following sections:

theoretical framework, data collection strategy, data

display andcase study presentation,and discussion of data

against the conceptsintroduced in the literature review.In

the conclusion, we describe the limits of our project,

present the managerial implications, and identify

perspectives for further research.

Theoretical framework

This section is divided into four sub-sections. It reviews

the role of managerial capabilities in the orchestration of

resources and the importance of ‘boundary spanning’in

the dynamic capabilities perspective with regard to

‘sensing’,‘seizing’and ‘reconfiguring’.

Managerial capabilities and the orchestration of

resources in transnational firms

Managerial capabilities and interactions represent key

dimensions for the identification of new opportunities

and the subsequent combination of resources (Kor and

Mesko, 2013). They require formal and informal

mechanisms of coordination and various managerial roles

to address the complexity in the constantrecombination of

knowledge and resources.

The entrepreneurial role represents a key dimension for

the understanding of the dynamic capabilities propagation

throughout a firm (Teece, 2014). Chesbrough (2010) and

Augier and Teece (2009) explain that managerial and

entrepreneurial roles tend to blend. Few investigations

actually study the link between managers and the

categories of ‘sensing’,‘seizing’and ‘reconfiguring’.

Teece (2014) only explains that the entrepreneurial

dimension is a key for the implementation of ‘sensing’,

while the managerial dimension represents the aspect of

‘seizing’and ‘reconfiguring’because of the complexity

faced by managers.

Teece (2014) also mentions the complementarities

between global and local managers in the orchestration

of resources. He points out that global managers commit

to the orchestration of resources by focusing on

technology transfer, the consistency between local levels,

and the management of the complementarities between

business units. Bartlett and Ghoshal (1992), Kor and

Mesko (2013) and Teece (2014) acknowledge that global

managers playa key role; however, at the same time, these

authors explainthat contributions by businessunit-related

managers are often underestimated. Local managers

contribute with specific know-how that is linked to the

specificities of local ecosystems. They accumulate

experience and an understanding of local rules and of

clients’actual needs in a specific market. However, the

academic literature remains unclear on how managers

contribute to the orchestration of resources and to the

evolution of transnational firms.

Setting aside the particulars of actual individual roles,

the nature of interactions between managers also

V. Mérindol and D.W. Versailles

©2018 European Academy of Management

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