FACTORS OF CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM COOPETITION: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

INTRODUCTION

Increasing competition poses new challenges for companies. Team-based structures and collaborative work become more important to meet market demands (Galpin et al., 2007). One way to bind organizational units together for collaborative work and to provide competence gains and productivity is to create cross-functional teams (Mohamed et al., 2004). A cross-functional team is a group of members with different kinds of expertise (Ghobadi & D'Ambra, 2013) working together towards a common goal, expecting to be more creative, innovative (Sethi et al., 2001), and successful (Ernst et al., 2010).

In 1997, Brandenburger and Nalebuff (1997) adapted the concept of coopetition from game theory to business management. They suggested, using several examples from the industry, that companies should not compete with their competitors, but rather cooperate with them in order to gain market advantages. Also among the pioneers of the coopetition strategy were Lado et al. (1997) and Bengtsson et al. (1999), who saw the greatest potential for a company's performance not in pure cooperation or pure competition, but in coopetition. Coopetition can be categorized into different levels (Bendig et al., 2018; Dorn et al., 2016; Le Roy & Czakon, 2016; Luo et al., 2006). On the interfirm level, coopetition is based on the dynamics of teams from different companies working together, whereas intrafirms' coopetition focuses on working groups from different business areas or functional departments within a single company. Le Roy and Czakon (2016) divided the multilevel even further by focusing on the individual. On the contrary, Dorn et al. (2016) and Lascaux (2020) described the network level, a higher-level structure in which the interfirm level moves to coopetition within and between networks, ecosystems, and so on.

On the interfirm level, competition pushes firms to innovate and to improve products continuously. They can secure their market position and improve performance (Gnyawali & Park, 2011). The rivalry does not mean collaboration cannot exist, but rather it coexists with cooperation (Le Roy & Czakon, 2016). Companies collaborate with other companies to increase their own competitive advantages, to become better in the market, explore each other's know-how for private gains, and to control their own knowledge (Hamel et al., 1989), which also give the same opportunity for the rival (Le Roy & Czakon, 2016). Per this theory, coopetition is a way that companies can improve their performance. However, in creating benefits from collaboration with a rival by sharing knowledge, the coopetitor also benefits and becomes more dangerous. With access to new knowledge and skills, the rival become more competitive (Sanou et al., 2016). This paradox of coopetition can improve the success of a company but also brings issues for other companies (Bonel & Rocco, 2007).

The research on the intrafirm level has gained less attention than that on the interfirm level (Strese et al., 2016b). Luo et al. (2006) outlined cross-functional coopetition, a double-edged sword of cooperative and competitive behaviors. They discovered both behaviors have positive effects on knowledge transfer and performance in the market. On the one hand, cooperative behavior strengthens the focus of cross-functional coordination (Griffin & Hauser, 1992). Also, competitive behavior can provide incentive to share knowledge and nurture productive interactions (Tsai, 2002), but on the other hand, the risk of conflict of cross-functional teams can also be higher (Levina, 2005; Tortoriello & Krackhardt, 2010). Cross-functional rivalry can emerge when functional areas are competing with each other, which can reduce performance (Ghobadi & D'Ambra, 2012b; Luo et al., 2006). Among employees, tension can occur when competitors become partners and vice versa (Gnyawali & Park, 2011; Raza-Ullah et al., 2014).

The research on the paradox of coopetition at the intrafirm and the individual levels is very limited. Unlike working groups in which employees from different companies work together, intrafirm working groups do not have the same tension of coopetition. The rivalry is different in intrafirm groups, because they can better identify themselves as belonging. Nevertheless, cross-functional groups have members who identify with their own functional groups. If teams work cross-functionally with the social identification of their own departments, this can lead to group conflicts (Ambrose et al., 2018). Moreover, shared resource pools as well as different goals and backgrounds of the team members can also lead to tension, resulting in lower team performance (Pee et al., 2010). Employees need to create a common identity in coopetitive activities in order to overcome these risks (Gnyawali & Park, 2011; Raza-Ullah et al., 2014).

Due to this wide range of aspects having different influences on coopetition, the current research lacks a clear synthesis of study findings from recent years. To reflect the current state of research, this literature analysis examines factors and aspects that have contributed to cross-functional team coopetition for the last 11 years. This literature review focuses on intrafirm coopetition; moreover, it only deals with coopetition among cross-functional teams.

The objective was to generate insights that provide an overview of the aspects of cross-functional team coopetition. Therefore, the following research question was raised: What are the factors of cross-functional team coopetition?

The first section defines the methodology of the systematic review. Using the PRISMA concept, all publications were filtered from the literature databases Google Scholar, Emerald, and Elsevier. The second section presents a qualitative synthesis of the relevant publications in blocks of the different business areas as well as a short, descriptive presentation of the publications, focusing on success factors. The third section categorizes the factors of cross-functional team coopetition into categories.

METHODOLOGY

There were several previous systematic literature reviews on the topic of coopetition. Using three academic databases and the top 10 journals, Dorn et al. (2016) analyzed articles related to coopetition using the keywords co-opetition, co-operation, and competition. In total, they filtered out 169 applicable articles. They found that the literature could be divided into different phases (i.e., the initial phase, the managing phase, and the evaluation phase) but also different levels (e.g., network level, interfirm level, and intrafirm level; Dorn et al., 2016).

Bengtsson and Ullah (2016) published a systematic literature review in the same year. They had similar results when they classified the relevant articles into intrafirm, network, dyadic, and triadic levels. It is remarkable that only 5% of the relevant literature is at the intrafirm level. Moreover, the outcomes of the different studies were categorized as innovation, knowledge, performance, or relationship. On the basis of Bengtsson and Ullah (2016), we used these categories to classify the articles.

Bouncken et al. (2015) identified 82 articles by using the keywords co-op* and coop* in different literature database. They also gave possible dimensions for future coopetition research on multiple levels, ranging from a micro level (individual) to a macro level (interfirm, network).

The systematic review of this article is based on the PRISMA concept (Moher et al., 2009). In the first step, the literature was extracted from the Emerald and Elsevier literature databases. In the context of the research, the following search terms were applied for the evaluation of the databases to texts, titles, abstract and author-supplied keywords: cross-functional coopetition, interdepartmental coopetition, and interdisciplinary coopetition. These generic words were chosen because the terminology and findings from studies are rarely found in studies focusing on coopetition, often finding their ways on other theories (Dorn et al., 2016 Because we focused on the generic team level, these keywords were most reasonable and therefore entered in each database during the search.

Given the diversity of available publications, appropriate limits must be applied to the search. First, only literature penned in the English language and published or frequently referenced in academic journals was considered to account for quality and traceability. The automatic database search was limited to literature published between 2010 and 2020. Next, the scrutinized literature publications were limited to following areas: the literature must (a) deal with coopetition of cross-functional teams, (b) focus on the industry sector, and (c) also discuss success practices, factors, and aspects (see Table 1).

TABLE 1 Review Protocol

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In the first procedure, the search terms described in the previous paragraph were entered crosswise. The combinatorics were repeated for all databases. The automatic database search yielded 2597 hits. After filtering by years of publication, publication date, type of publication, and language and searching only in title, abstract, or keywords specified by the author, the database search yielded 528 hits for the literature databases (Table 2).

TABLE 2 Filter Criteria

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All databases included redundant journals; 29 articles were removed due to redundancies. The remaining 499 hits were evaluated on the basis of the titles and the abstracts in terms of whether they could contribute to answering the research question. Here, the authors' subjective evaluation was decisive for further filtering.

The scrutinized findings were considered irrelevant when articles did not deal with the coopetition of cross-functional teams. Articles were excluded when they did not address both coopetition and competition as main concepts (e.g., Ali Köseoglu et al., 2016; Rafi-Ul-Shan et al., 2018; Zhao & Peng, 2018). In addition, some articles dealt on the interfirm level, not on the cross-functional team level (e.g., Anand et al., 2020; Burström, 2012; Chai et al., 2019; Hani & Dagnino, 2020; Soppe et al., 2014). Second, we removed articles if coopetition was only used as a catchword and the article did not relate the concept to business or management (Holgersson et al., 2018; Zuccalà & Verga, 2017). After reviewing the titles, 246 hits remained; a further 173 articles were removed as a result of screening the abstract.

In this step, for the remaining 73 publications, the entire text was checked in addition to the table of contents. In general, publications were excluded from the literature review that did not show any practices, factors, or aspects of coopetition in cross-functional teams. Other studies discussed coopetition as a general characteristic in industrial companies, but did not specify it by methods, procedures, and so on. These publications were also not relevant for this work and were rejected. In total, 21 of the 73 publications were relevant for the systematic review. From the screening, the references of the relevant studies were also checked, which led to further publications that were also relevant. Thus, four additional articles were included in the review (Figure 1).

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RESULTS

The 25 relevant publications for cross-functional coopetition were categorized by content. It became clear that coopetition of cross-functional teams led to changes in various outcomes, such as innovation, performance, relationships, and knowledge. These outcomes were partly moderated and mediated by different factors. In other cases, studies showed that some factors were directly influenced by the coopetitive tensions of cross-functional teams.

In total, 19 publications used quantitative research methods to investigate various factors of cross-functional team coopetition, whereas only six publications used qualitative research methods. This increase of quantitative work on cross-functional coopetition is surprising, given that previous systematic literature reviews on coopetition predominantly published papers using qualitative research methods (Bengtsson et al., 2013; Bouncken et al., 2015).

Looking at the journals, most of the identified publications were in the industrial marketing sector, with seven articles published in industrial marketing management and two articles published in the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing (see Table 3). This is not unexpected, because past research of coopetition focused on the market phenomenon of duality between cooperation and competition and influenced the actions of market participants. The focus was mainly on business-to-business marketing. Table 3 provides an overview of the factors classified into the four overarching outcomes.

TABLE 3 Summary of Most Relevant Social Aspects From Literature Review

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In the following paragraphs, the previously identified 25 articles are presented in a qualitative synthesis. The articles are classified into and presented as four outcomes: knowledge-, performance-, relationship-, and innovation-related outcomes (see Table 3).

It should be noted that when classifying the outcomes, these factors often overlap. Therefore, after subjective review, the classifications were assessed according to the most obvious outcome.

Coopetition on Different Levels

Among previous systematic literature reviews, the term coopetition was often defined at different levels. For example, Dorn et al. (2016) already stated that the term coopetition can be classified at the network, interfirm, and intrafirm levels. About 80% of all articles were addressed in the field of coopetition at the interfirm level, whereas only about 5% of all articles dealt with it at the intrafirm level (Dorn et al., 2016).

A similar classification on multiple levels of coopetition was found in the literature reviews by Bengtsson et al. (2014); however, coopetition was broken down to five levels (individual, intraorganizational, interorganizational, network, and internetwork). The articles showed similar results, finding that the individual and intraorganizational levels were sparse. The view regarding the lack of articles at the intraorganizational level was indisputably in line with most of the articles (Bengtsson et al., 2013; Bengtsson & Kock, 2014; Bouncken et al., 2015; Dorn et al., 2016).

On the basis of the results, the relevant articles that already addressed the cross-functional team level were classified to the sublevels of interteam and within-team in the present article. Table 4 shows the classification of the articles into the interteam and within-team levels.

TABLE 4 Outcome matrix on different levels

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The results show that the outcomes knowledge, performance, relationship, and innovation within the articles were not clearly separable. The articles often focused on one outcome but used the other outcomes as factors (including moderators and mediators) that also had an influence within coopetition. For example, Raza-Ulla (2020) examined the impact within coopetition tensions of emotional ambivalence, which was classified at the relationship level, on performance, where it was fully mediated by balancing capabilities. In another example, a study by Ghobadi and D'Ambra (2013), the influence of interdependence on knowledge sharing was investigated. Interdependence was defined by the degree to which cross-functional team members were dependent on other team members for their goals, tasks, resources, and identity (Ghobadi & D'Ambra, 2013). These factors can be grouped at the relationship level but also at the performance level.

Relationship- and knowledge-related outcomes were also frequently examined in articles, with coopetition within and between teams appearing with nearly equal frequency. Only articles dealing with innovation-related outcomes were sparse and were published only in 2017. This is also not surprising, because innovation was ignored in prior research.

Factors on Coopetition Within Teams

To increase the knowledge sharing outcome within cross-functional teams in coopetitive tensions, Ghobadi and D'Ambra (2013) found that cooperation within a team already had a direct positive impact on knowledge sharing among team members, whereas competition had a negative impact. In another study, they found that outcome was additionally moderated by the interdependence of team members with respect to individual goals, tasks, and resources (Ghobadi & D'Ambra, 2012a). In addition to interdependence, it is recommended within cross-functional teams to understand the importance of knowledge heterogeneity so that specific knowledge of team members can be accessed as coopetitive tensions at the right times (Zhang & Guo, 2019 Access to knowledge can be simplified by transactional memory systems (Zhang & Guo, 2019), but the creation of standards also simplifies the access for each team member (Chiambaretto et al., 2019).

Furthermore, the culture of a team also depends on coopetition. If team members feel connected due to similar hierarchies, similar ideas, or informal structures, uncertainty decreases, which then correlates positively with coopetition (Knein et al., 2020). The effect can be amplified by the personalities of the individual and by external market structures (Naidoo & Sutherland, 2016). Strese et al. (2016b) also provided similar results. They defined the degree to which team members found one another attractive as social cohesion. In cooperative tensions, social cohesion has a positive effect on the relationship and innovation of team members (Strese et al., 2016b).

Table 5 summarizes different factors of interteam and within-team coopetition in terms of the outcomes.

Table 5 Factors of Cross-Functional Team Coopetition

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CONCLUSIONS

In general, there is very little literature on the topic of coopetition in connection with cross-functional teams. With the help of the systematic review, insights into this topic were derived for future research. The 25 articles on cross-functional team coopetition can be classified into different outcomes in terms of focus.

First, it turns out that most of the articles are about knowledge- and performance-related outcomes, whereas innovation-related outcomes have been rarely researched. It is believed that performance- and knowledge-sharing–related factors are more quantitatively measurable and have been measured more often in the past than innovation-related factors (Ghobadi & D'Ambra, 2012b; Luo et al., 2006). In addition, the other outcomes also cover a wider range of case studies than the innovative factor. Only recently has there been a burgeoning of interest in the topic, including research by H. Chen et al. (2020), M. Chen et al. (2020), Chiambaretto et al. (2019), and Nguyen et al. (2018). Therefore, on the basis of the scarce literature results, it is recommended that further research be conducted on the topic of innovation, which is also instrumental to a company's competitiveness. In addition, the previous results reveal further research areas that can be explored within coopetitive tensions. Hence, within the identified factors, further subfactors can be added as moderators or mediators to find out a detailed dependency. For example, the factor “organizational identity” of An et al. (2020) can be analyzed in subfactors such as duration of existing teams, diversity, hierarchy, and closeness of thinking. In addition to the factors, subclasses can also be formed for the outcomes. Thus, the performance-related outcome could be subdivided into team performance outcome and also into individual performance outcome. This would lead to future articles providing finer outcomes that lead to more efficient success in business.

Second, the factors that moderate the outcomes often overlap. Moreover, the outcomes are mutually interrelated. Thus, the knowledge-related outcome also necessarily leads to better performance. The individual factors are also interrelated, so that a general model for clarifying team coopetition does not currently exist. In this respect, economic and behavioral psychology research could provide further insights into the interdependencies of knowledge, performance, relationship, and innovative interdependencies that can be translated into coopetitive tensions.

Third, articles often addressed both within-team and interteam coopetition. Only a handful of factors, therefore, can be grouped at both outcome and coopetition levels. Although past literature has distinguished among network coopetition, interfirm coopetition, and intrafirm coopetition, the subdivision of intrafirm coopetition into interteam and within-team coopetition makes this article among the first to make this distinction on this level of detail.

The study also contains some limitations. It focused on only six databases. Elsevier included renowned research papers on coopetition and was therefore included in the systematic review. JSTOR, SpringerLink, and Web of Science were selected because they represent a broad field of research in business and management. We supplemented the literature databases with GoogleScholar to find scientific papers that were not listed in them. Emerald had never been referenced in past systematic reviews in the context of coopetition and therefore served as a reference database to have a higher chance of deriving new findings. Because this research is limited to these databases, future studies could also refer to the databases used by past systematic reviews (Bengtsson & Raza-Ullah, 2016; Bouncken et al., 2015; Dorn et al., 2016). Another limitation of this systematic review is its focus on coopetition of cross-functional teams only. Coopetition between other groups, such as between anchor departments or to management, could also be considered within a company but was not addressed in this systematic review.