Good Lessons Despite Bad Feelings: How Boundary-Spanning Teams Learn from Collaboration Failure

To stay competitive, organizations set up boundary-spanning teams (BSTs) to learn from external partners. However, collaborating across boundaries is challenging and BSTs often face collaboration failure, defined as divergence from desired or expected collaboration goals. Given the costs associated with such failures, they usually evoke negative emotions which often lead to blaming the external partner and a collaboration breakdown, undermining joint learning from failure. This raises the question of how BSTs can learn from collaboration failure despite negative emotions. Our inductive study on drug discovery teams provides a silver lining: certain emotive-cognitive conditions can give rise to learning interactions that allow BSTs to either neutralize or transform their negative emotions into positive ones. Averting collaboration breakdown, these interactions allow BSTs to both create and integrate explicit knowledge after collaboration failure and change their collaboration dynamics in order to prevent failure in the future and improve their way of collaborating. Our study brings forward an emotive perspective on learning from collaboration failure and expands the literature on BSTs and emotions in groups. It further informs management practices on how to overcome negative emotions and beliefs so that BSTs sustain fruitful collaborations, enabling critical innovations such as treatments for diseases to be further developed.