Multi-Teaming: An Opportunity or a Threat for Team Creativity? A Temporal & Informational Exploration

The pervasiveness of multiple team membership in organizations that prioritize team creativity raises the important question of how multi-teaming affects creativity? Unfortunately, prior research on multi-teaming and creativity is limited to a few studies at the individual level. Knowing that the benefits and costs of multi- teaming are not homologous across levels of analysis, we address this question at the team level. We specifically examine key temporal (i.e., time pressure) and informational (i.e., information acquisition from other teams) mechanisms that underlie this relationship. We posit that the effect of multi-teaming on team creativity via time pressure is contingent on focal team synchronicity, and via information acquisition is contingent on focal team information usefulness. Our findings uncover a negative indirect effect of multi-teaming on team creativity via time pressure when the team communicates mostly in a synchronous manner. The informational path proved to be more complex. Though multi-teaming promoted information acquisition, this information resource did not facilitate team creativity when information usefulness is high. However, exploratory analyses revealed distinct effects on creative outcome novelty and usefulness. Our theoretical model was tested using time- lagged surveys in a sample of 92 teams based on 509 students in a university in the Netherlands."