You Don’t Need Authority to Move an Organization — The Art of the Boundary Spanner (MBA Power & Influence Day 4)

The Question That Hit Home: “Why Can You Move People Without Authority?”

Have you ever been asked to drive something important in your organization, only to realize you have no formal authority over the people you need to move?

You’re leading a cross-functional project, but you can’t direct other departments. You’re coordinating with an alliance partner, but you have no power to change internal policies. The path forward is clear, yet your official position falls far short of what the task demands.

Day 4 of the Globis MBA course “Power and Influence” focused on a deceptively simple theme: how to move organizations with different cultures. The class examined a business alliance between two major IT companies, followed by a Beer Company Game that brought the Prisoner’s Dilemma to life.

This session also carried the course’s only written report assignment, worth 40% of the final grade. But for me, the significance went far beyond grades. This was the session that most closely mirrored my own professional reality — because I spend every working day influencing people I have no formal authority over.

In this article, I’ll share what I learned about boundary spanners, trust-based influence, and how these concepts connect directly to my experience as an IT manager bridging Japanese and Indian teams.

This article is part 4 of my Globis MBA “Power and Influence” series.

The Alliance Case: Why a Win-Win Partnership Stalled

The Day 4 case centered on a business alliance between two major IT companies. On paper, the partnership made strategic sense for both sides. In practice, it was going nowhere.

We analyzed the situation from the perspective of the Alliance Manager (AM) and identified several root causes:

• Too many initiatives at once: The companies tried to pursue multiple collaboration tracks simultaneously, diluting focus and energy
• Clashing corporate cultures: One company favored deliberate consensus-building; the other operated with a “try it first” agile mindset
• Weak organizational support: Frontline employees had little incentive to prioritize the alliance
• Misaligned evaluation systems: Sales teams got no credit for selling the partner’s products, so they simply didn’t

When we mapped these issues onto the Power & Influence framework, a clear hypothesis emerged:

The AM’s formal authority < The difficulty of driving the alliance

In other words, the person responsible for making the alliance work had not been given enough formal power to actually do it.

Three Audiences, Three Sets of Interests

The class identified three groups the AM needed to influence, each with distinct interests and concerns:

1. Top Management

Senior leaders wanted the alliance to succeed most, yet they gave the AM only limited authority. At the same time, the alliance couldn’t move forward without the AM’s domain expertise. This was, in fact, an interdependent relationship — and the AM needed to recognize and leverage it.

2. Business Units (BUs)

BUs that stood to benefit from the partnership were natural allies. But BUs whose products competed with the partner’s offerings saw the alliance as a threat. The AM had to navigate both cooperation and resistance within the same organization.

3. The Counterpart AM

One of the most striking insights was this: the AM on the other side of the table was fighting the same internal battles. The counterpart wasn’t an adversary — they were a fellow traveler in a parallel struggle. Recognizing this shift in perspective proved essential to moving the alliance forward.

Bridging the Culture Gap

One of the most engaging discussions explored the cultural differences between the two companies — a legacy enterprise known for caution and process, and a younger firm that prized speed and experimentation. The key takeaway wasn’t about which culture was “right.” It was about recognizing that each culture has its own internal logic.

The instructor posed a provocative question: “Do you see these two companies as different, or as similar?”

This resonated with what I’ve learned in cross-cultural management: as long as you focus on differences, it’s nearly impossible to genuinely respect the other side. The cognitive shift toward finding common ground is what opens the door to real collaboration.

The Role-Play: Trying to Persuade a Hostile Business Unit

The most impactful moment of Day 4 was the role-play exercise.

Students paired up: one played the AM, the other played a BU head who opposed the alliance. The AM’s mission was to win cooperation — without any formal authority. But the BU role was deliberately designed to resist all persuasion. After the exercise, the room was filled with a collective sense of frustration: “Is this even possible?”

Then the instructor asked a question that reframed everything:

“Why wasn’t the AM given formal authority in the first place?”

The answer was paradoxical. If the AM had been given strong positional power, the principle of commitment and consistency would have worked against them. Once you stake out a firm position backed by authority, you lose the flexibility needed to navigate a constantly shifting negotiation landscape. By deliberately withholding formal authority, the organization enabled the AM to negotiate on principle — focusing on what was best for both companies rather than defending a fixed position.

This was a revelation. I had always seen “lack of authority” as a disadvantage. Day 4 showed me it can be a strategic asset.

Start Small, Build Trust

The second half of the case examined how the alliance eventually gained traction. Three approaches proved critical:

1. Narrow the scope

Rather than fighting resistance head-on, the AMs focused only on areas where collaboration was easiest. This created space for the two AMs to get to know each other deeply and build mutual trust.

2. Create early wins

By delivering results in the narrowed scope, they generated social proof. Nothing changes a skeptic’s mind faster than seeing a concrete success story. Those early wins became the most powerful argument for expanding the partnership.

3. Establish a robust master agreement

The initial collaboration produced a comprehensive framework agreement that made subsequent initiatives much easier to launch. The principle of commitment and consistency worked positively here — once stakeholders had agreed to a direction, they naturally continued along that path.

The influence principles at work here map directly to Cialdini’s framework from Day 1: liking (trust through mutual understanding), social proof (attitude change through demonstrated success), and commitment and consistency (behavioral momentum from the master agreement). It was powerful to see these principles operate at the scale of an inter-organizational alliance.

The Beer Company Game: Experiencing the Prisoner’s Dilemma

The second half of class was an experiential exercise.

Students paired up as brand managers of two subsidiaries (A and B) within Beer Company X. Each month, both players independently decided whether to “increase” or “maintain” their promotional spending. Payoffs depended on the combination of choices:

• Both maintain: 300 million yen each
• One increases, one maintains: 500 million for the aggressor, zero for the other
• Both increase: minus 200 million each

Communication was prohibited. The game ran for five rounds (April through August).

The pattern was striking: once one player defected, retaliation spiraled and trust collapsed. Pairs that chose cooperation from the start, however, accumulated consistently high returns.

The lesson the exercise drove home was “enlightened self-interest” — the idea that the best way to maximize your own outcomes is to act with genuine concern for the other party’s outcomes.

The class also explored three principles that explain why pure selfishness is unsustainable in the long run:

1. The reciprocity barrier: Purely selfish individuals eventually find no one willing to work with them
2. The detection principle: Humans have an evolved ability to spot those who exploit trust for short-term gain
3. Group selection: Communities that cannot contain selfish behavior ultimately collapse (the fall of Easter Island’s civilization was cited as an example)

People who play only for short-term advantage may appear to win initially, but they inevitably lose trust, become isolated, and fail. This evolutionary psychology mechanism operates just as surely in business as it does in nature.

Defining Trust: Believing in Someone Despite Uncertainty

Near the end of Day 4, the instructor introduced social psychologist Toshio Yamagishi’s definition of trust, which has stayed with me:

“Trust is the belief that the other person will not act harmfully toward you, based on your assessment of their character, even when social uncertainty exists.“

The crucial phrase is “even when social uncertainty exists.”

Trusting someone when you have complete information isn’t trust — it’s calculation. Real trust means believing in another person’s character when the outcome is genuinely uncertain. That is the essence of trust.

In the Beer Company Game, choosing “maintain” was precisely this act of trust. If the other player defected, you’d get nothing. Yet choosing to cooperate anyway — believing “this person will come through” — and doing so repeatedly, produced the best outcomes for both parties.

In the alliance case too, the AM’s eventual success rested on this same foundation: the willingness to trust despite uncertainty.

Where This Hits Home: The IT Manager as Boundary Spanner

Day 4 was the session closest to my daily work.

I’m an IT manager at a technology vendor. My job is to keep projects moving between three groups: the client, our domestic development team, and a global team at our Indian parent company. Each operates with different cultural norms, different evaluation criteria, and different time horizons. And I have no formal authority over any of them.

The parallels with the AM’s situation are remarkable.

My company was acquired by an Indian firm, so I work daily at the intersection of Japanese and Indian business cultures. The case’s cultural comparison — cautious process orientation versus agile speed — maps almost perfectly onto what I experience every day. The Japanese team values consensus; the Indian team values speed and execution. Neither is wrong. But without someone standing in the middle, projects simply don’t move.

Writing the report assignment helped me realize something I hadn’t consciously articulated before: I’ve been acting as a boundary spanner for years. Bridging boundaries, translating information between groups, linking people who wouldn’t otherwise connect — that’s the textbook definition.

But the class also covered the challenges boundary spanners face:

• Torn between conflicting values and beliefs
• Marginalized by the groups they serve
• Pulled toward their “home” group’s perspective

Every one of these resonated. I’ve been caught between clients and development teams, questioned about whose side I’m on. The global team calls Japan “special”; the local team says headquarters doesn’t understand the field. Navigating that space — staying neutral, pursuing the overall optimum — is both the burden and the reward of being a boundary spanner.

The Biggest Lesson from the Report Assignment

Day 4 included a major report assignment. Through the deep analysis required, my most significant takeaway was the importance of “designing power.”

The case’s AM was personally trustworthy and skilled at building relationships. But they couldn’t translate their influence into organizational structures. Without the ability to redesign evaluation systems or incentive frameworks, personal persuasion alone wasn’t enough to move the front lines.

This is a warning I need to hear myself. I tend to rely on personal relationships — but relationship-based power resets to zero when people change roles. What the AM needed — and what I need — is the ability to design influence: determining who to approach, in what sequence, with what currency, through which channels. That design capability is just as critical for an IT manager as it is for an alliance manager.

Closing Thoughts: Be the First to Give Trust

At the end of Day 4, the instructor asked a question I haven’t been able to forget:

“Are you giving trust first — investing in building and accumulating trust through your own actions?”

As the Beer Company Game demonstrated, trust begins with choosing cooperation before you know whether it will be reciprocated. You go first, accepting the short-term risk, because long-term reciprocal relationships generate the greatest returns for everyone.

The AM in the case ultimately succeeded by starting small — narrowing the alliance scope and making the first move toward collaboration. Shelving the hostile BUs and building a track record with willing partners wasn’t compromise. It was a structural strategy for accumulating trust.

I face this same dynamic every day, bridging Japanese and Indian teams, standing between clients and developers. My formal authority is limited. But that limitation is precisely what allows me to move flexibly. Day 4 taught me that lacking authority isn’t weakness — it’s a strategic position that enables principled negotiation.

Start by giving trust first. Then make sure that trust doesn’t remain purely personal — connect it to systems, processes, and structures. As a boundary spanner, that’s my next frontier.