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Introduction
Organizations today face uncertainty, rapid environmental changes, globalization and increasing complexity in their work tasks. These factors make organizations evolve continuously, becoming more dynamic, and unstable (Day et al., 2004, 2006). One way of adapting to such conditions is to organize different kinds of work using a team-based structure (Ehrhadt et al., 2014). The logical reasons underlying the use of these cross-functional teams are that, when the experts, as representatives of all the relevant areas are gathered together, the team’s decisions will likely be able to cover a wide range of perspectives and issues, which may affect the success of their collective efforts (Van Der Vegt and Bunderson, 2005). Therefore, creating a multidisciplinary management team is attractive to the organizations, because the individuals in an organization have different information, knowledge and skills to use for solving the issues or complex problems that arise (Van Der Vegt and Bunderson, 2005). On the other hand, this heterogeneity of knowledge and the background of the team members, in response to the dynamic environment and the solving of problems, creates a cross-functional team that has a very high degree of ambiguity (Daspit et al., 2013).
Intra-firm causal ambiguity is defined as a lack of understanding of the logical causal relationship between action and outcome, input and output, cause and effect, the factors of production and how they interact with each other, as well as between competence and competitive advantage (Alvares and Antolin, 2005; King and Zeithalm, 2001; Szulanski, 1996). This has been declared one of the barriers to performance, as it is a variable which prevents the learning (Huber, 1991) and transfer of knowledge (Kogut and Zander, 1993; Simonin, 1999; Szulanski, 1996). In the context of cross-functional teams, the lack of understanding of the causal relationship between inputs and outputs, or the factors that contribute to the success or failure of a project cause the team to fail to understand the project’s objectives, with regard to the details of the process of the project, the project’s needs and the knowledge management for it (Potter and Lawson, 2013).
A meta-analysis conducted by King (2007) shows that intra-firm causal ambiguity at the team level is still rarely studied. The research into intra-firm causal ambiguity at the team...