A new study by UCL School of Management associate professor Dr Vivianna Fang He reveals how teams collaborating with partners outside of their organisations can succeed and learn from their failures if they manage their emotions and boundaries collectively.
Published in Organization Science and co-authored with Georg von Krogh (ETH Zurich) and Zoe Jonassen (University of St. Gallen), the paper explores the emotional and structural dynamics that shape whether and how a team recovers from failure or falls apart.
The authors conducted their research by following eight boundary-spanning teams (BSTs) inside a global pharmaceutical company, each working with academic partners on drug discovery projects.
Despite shared goals, every team experienced a significant collaboration failure, ranging from misaligned experimental steps to disputes over intellectual property, with these failures often triggering strong frustration, anxiety or anger. The ways in which teams responded emotionally to failure also had a direct impact on whether they learned and continued collaborating, or whether they disengaged entirely.
The study explores the concept of “boundary beliefs”, how team members perceive the divide between themselves and their collaborators. Teams with exclusive boundary beliefs saw themselves as separate from their partners, which often led to blame and emotional fragmentation. Teams with inclusive boundary beliefs saw everyone as part of the same team, fostering shared ownership and resilience.
Dr Vivianna Fang He said:
“These boundary beliefs set the cognitive frame for team members to make sense of their experiences in the collaborative projects, including their experience of failure.”
Teams that turned their frustration inward, blaming each other or their external partners, struggled to reflect on what went wrong, often leading to the collaboration itself ending.
The teams that directed their emotions outward, developing internal plans to protect their interests and asking external partners to adapt, did help to preserve tangible outcomes like patents or publications, but left their teams anxious and uncertain about their partners’ processes.
The teams that saw themselves and their external collaborators as part of the same unit would instead direct their frustration at the situation and reflected jointly with their partners.
By collaboratively adapting work processes and justifying the changes internally, negative emotions were transformed into excitement and hope and the collaboration not only continued but improved.
The authors also challenge the idea that successful collaboration depends on maintaining a “feel-good” culture when in fact, trying to suppress negative emotions may do more harm than good.
What matters is where those emotions are directed. Teams that acknowledge and channel their frustration constructively are more likely to reflect, adapt and continue working together.
Dr He added:
“Bad feelings do not necessarily exclude good lessons. Negative emotions are charged with potential for activating learning and reflection—the outcome really depends on how this emotional energy is channelled.”
