Influences of Multiple Role Management Strategies

What is it about?

One may think that getting a PhD or a DBA after an experience in industry, or working part-time as a consultant throughout academic tenure automatically awards the status of boundary spanner, and all the benefits it implies, such as, for instance, the knowledge advantages of a financial broker or the reputation of a cultural mediator. However, our study shows that scholar-practitioners have a very hard time defining who they are, professionally and personally speaking, because they are caught in between institutional pressures for role separation, on the one side, and their personal desideratum for role integration, on the other side. Specifically, we show that scholar-practitioners move differently on the separation-integration continuum, according to how experienced they are. The less experienced scholar-practitioners seem to be more subject to pressures for role separation and follow a strategy that constantly reorders the priority of their roles, avoiding this way an overloading integration. The more the scholar-practitioners progress in their career, the more they are willing to integrate their roles, through strategies that we called “role interspacing” and “temporary role bundling” which, however, do not reach a full level of integration.

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Why is it important?

An important feature of the study is the concern not only with how boundary spanning occurs but also with what kind of knowledge gets transferred from one role to another. We found that role management strategies that are closer to the separation pole allow scholar-practitioners to make operations with contents, while strategies that are closer to the integration pole enable them to transfer across roles procedural knowledge, and, in the condition of highest role integration, metaknowledge -i.e., knowledge about who knows whom and who knows what in their social networks.

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