Bridging representational gaps through identification: theoretical and practical implications for team work

Cross-functional teams often experience representational gaps – incompatibilities in how team members define problems, interpret tasks, and prioritize goals. These gaps impair information processing and coordination, causing misunderstandings and generating relational conflicts. Bridging them requires cognitive integration through which members engage with and incorporate others’ perspectives, and affective integration through which trust, respect, and liking sustain openness to divergent views that are not fully understood. Existing research explored the structural conditions for integration with limited explanation as to why team members may or may not be motivated to engage with them. Drawing on social identification theory, we extend extant research to theorize how collective and relational identification shape cognitive and affective integration in distinct ways. We propose that collective identification amplifies representational gaps by reinforcing functional in-group boundaries and heightening defensiveness, whereas relational identification narrows them by fostering interpersonal openness, perspective taking, and willingness to reconcile divergent viewpoints. We further theorize that ‘relationally identified’ members can motivate collectivists to pursue integration, implying identification composition as a team-level lever. Our propositions articulate the interplay between social identification and representational gaps and provide the psychological foundations that structural accounts of managing epistemic differences lack, while offering practical insights into team design and relational culture.