Problems with social networking outside the organization

My last blog post was about initiating relationships amongst employees. Throughout this blog I want to talk a little bit more about the problems that appear in a process of initiating relationships and collaboration across Organizational Boundaries.
We all know that well established companies eventually move abroad sending some of their executives and managers to operate some place else. While company scatter through different parts of the world, it gets even harder and harder to collaborate with one another, especially when companies hire other nationality workers into their staff. All of the managers that operate in scattered companies are in need of a strong social network. Specific expertise of the employee is highly valued, but to connect and encourage collaboration amongst them becomes extremely difficult. To strengthen the link between employees outside the organizational boundaries, we first have to analyze the network and find the problems that initiated the separation between people.
Most of the managers are using collaborative technologies, such as virtual problem-solving spaces and online resumes that help employees find colleagues with specific expertise (The Hidden Powers of Social Networks). Most importantly managers cannot escape the problems they face trying to bridge the physical distance across organizational boundaries.
The book Hidden Powers of Social Networks does a great job pointing out that the lack of trust is extremely missing in the organizations; most of the workers are willing to share their expertise only with their long term colleagues or friends. The other problems that organizations face are cultural.
“People in different countries preferred to interact with others of the same nationality. And, as often occurs in technical work, a “not-invented-here” mentality contributed substantially to the isolation of subgroups.” (The Hidden Powers of Social Networks)
Organization leaders have to ascertain, and really find out what is their identity, position and level of connectivity with other employees, excluding other executives outside the company. Most of the executives tend to collaborate with other executives, leaving other employees outside of their own created social network barrier. Based on this characteristic and through their actions, they insensibly encourage other people to collaborate the same way; with people with the same shared expertise in particular field. People end up talking about common things, which is not very functional, because the lack of different point of views from different experts could not really guide to any innovations or to a complete improvement of the organization’s operations.