Team Boundary Blurring: Implications for the Next Decade of Teams Research

Team boundary blurring has become a defining feature of contemporary teamwork. Building on prior research, this essay conceptualizes boundary blurring along three trends: team fluidity (membership change), team overlap (multiple team membership), and geographic dispersion (through remote/distributed work). These trends are likely to intensify as employment becomes more flexible, project-based work expands, and hybrid work makes virtual collaboration common to a large portion of modern teams. This is critical because boundary blurring implies that team members differentially engage in and observe team interactions, increasing the likelihood that experiences and perceptions of team processes diverge rather than converge. This challenges the widespread reliance on compositional emergence assumptions and consensus-based aggregation in team research. The essay argues for stronger adoption of configural and process-oriented approaches to capture how team interaction structures emerge and evolve over time.