Collaboration Across Knowledge Boundaries within Diverse Teams: Reciprocal Expertise Affirmation as an Enabling Condition

We review research on expertise diversity, psychological safety, team collaboration, and role identity to propose a model in which reciprocal affirmations of expertise identity among team members—a feature of the team environment that we conceptualize as a dimension of team psychological safety—moderates the relationship between expertise diversity and collaboration across disciplinary or knowledge-based boundaries. We argue that mixed expertise teams in which members must work together across knowledge boundaries to accomplish challenging goals will be more likely to collaborate effectively if each individual member perceives that his or her expert identity, defined broadly to encompass disciplinary and other primary sources of role identification within the work context, is validated and valued by other team members. Reciprocal expertise affirmation is further hypothesized to be necessary but not sufficient for collaboration across expertise divides within diverse teams. We propose that conceptualizing reciprocal expertise affirmation as a dimension of psychological safety is a promising avenue through which to integrate positive identity with existing theory on interpersonal collaboration. Psychological safety is expected to reduce identity threats that may otherwise arise in diverse expertise contexts, encouraging open discussion of uncertainty, confusion, and mistakes and supporting learning across disciplinary boundaries. This lens on positive identity and collaboration exposes new opportunities for research on the role of positive identity as a moderator of multidisciplinary work processes within defined task groups.