A method for operating a user equipment (UE) comprises receiving configuration information on a set of transmission configuration indicator (TCI) states; receiving a beam indication indicating at least one TCI state from the set of TCI states, wherein the at least one TCI state indicates a group of M beams partitioned into K sets of beams for K entities (E1, E2, . . . EK), where an i-th set of beams is associated with entity Ei and comprises Ni beams, and Σi=1K Ni=M; decoding the beam indication; determining a beam for entity Ei based on the i-th set of beams; and transmitting an uplink (UL) transmission or receiving a downlink (DL) transmission based on the determined beam for entity Ei, wherein i is an entity index and takes a value from {1, . . . , K}.