Multiple team membership: Embracing Influences and experiences

Multiple team membership (MTM)—defined as working on more than one team at a time—is ingrained in organizational functioning worldwide. It is a practice that represents the daily reality of many employees, as organizations increasingly adopt work across multiple concurrent teams to accomplish complex tasks, achieve faster results, and leverage employees’ resources as efficiently as possible. Nevertheless, scholarly interest in MTM has gained momentum only recently, raising questions about the applicability of much of our existing knowledge derived from single-team contexts. Understanding MTM is important due to this evident disconnect between research and practice, as well as the vast opportunities MTM offers for shaping workplaces through employees’ far-reaching networks of teams. This dissertation directs attention to MTM’s influences and experiences in three chapters (i.e., chapters 2 to 4), studying them using different theoretical perspectives and methods.

In chapter 2, I conducted an integrative review of the multiteaming literature to understand MTM’s influence on effectiveness outcomes. As a result of this critical evaluation of extant work, I delineated and elaborated on three sources of variance to explain the inconsistency in findings: 1) what is being studied—the aspects and nature of multiteaming; 2) how MTM is thought to affect effectiveness—the processes through which multiteaming transforms into (in)effectiveness; and 3) who are the multiteamers—the characteristics of multiteamers. In chapter 3, I studied how team MTM alters team communication and information processes. Using adaptive structuration theory as a lens, I designed a study to understand when teams organize their work more asynchronously for their members’ MTM and what are the subsequent implications of team asynchronicity on team outcomes like creativity. By showing that team asynchronicity is a common and costly remedy for MTM, I thus provided initial evidence regarding scholars’ advice on using technologies asynchronously for team MTM, directed focus to the duality of MTM and technology use that is common in practice, and shifted attention to studying team virtuality from a malleable lens. In chapter 4, I delved into knowledge workers’ accounts of MTM to uncover their rationales and approaches for multiteaming. In an inductive qualitative study, I found distinct context-based, task-based, and person-based workers’ rationales to justify MTM, and specified workers’ MTM approaches, which entailed prioritizing efforts, arranging participation across teams, and resorting to suboptimal work practices.The emergent model presented workers that adopted a person-based rationale placed greater emphasis and importance on arranging their MTM participation.

Together, my work contributes to the scholarly discussion on multiteaming by (a) consolidating research insights in the literature around the relationship between MTM and effectiveness outcomes (chapter 2), (b) examining the team-level influence of MTM on underlying team communication and information processes (chapter 3), and (c) identifying the MTM rationales and approaches of knowledge workers and their intersections (chapter 4).