Abstract
Firms devoted to research and development and innovative activities intensively use teams to carry out knowledge intensive work and increasingly ask their employees to be engaged in multiple teams (e.g., R&D project teams) simultaneously. The literature has extensively investigated the antecedents of single teams performance, but has largely overlooked the effects of multiple team membership (MTM), i.e., the participation of a focal team’s members in multiple teams simultaneously, on the focal team outcomes. In this paper we examine the relationships between team performance, MTM, the use of collaborative technologies (instant messaging), and work-place social networks (external advice receiving). The data collected in the R&D unit of an Italian company support the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between MTM and team performance such that teams whose members are engaged simultaneously in few or many teams experience lower performance. We found that receiving advice from external sources moderated this relationship. When MTM is low or high, external advice receiving has a positive effect, while at intermediate levels of MTM it has a negative effect. Finally, the average use of instant messaging in the team also moderated the relationship such that at low levels of MTM, R&D teams whose members use instant messaging intensively attain higher performance while at high levels of MTM an intense use of instant messaging is associated with lower team performance. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications for innovative firms engaged in multitasking work scenarios.
Highlights
Organizations increasingly adopt work teams to perform knowledge intensive tasks and coordination activities (Hoegl and Proserpio, 2004; Ferriani et al, 2009; Zaccaro et al, 2012)
In this paper we focus on instant messaging (IM), that has become a common means of communication in work contexts (Tudor and Pettely, 2010; Radicati, 2012) and is suitable to R&D contexts because its quasi-synchronous features and likely “polychronic” use (e.g., Dennis et al, 2010)
Based on recent literature on social networks we argue that, for teams that operate in the unique context of multi-team membership (MTM), external advice receiving affects the strengths of different processes for teams whose members operate at low and at high levels of MTM and, it will act as a moderator of the relationship between MTM and team performance
Summary
Organizations increasingly adopt work teams to perform knowledge intensive tasks and coordination activities (Hoegl and Proserpio, 2004; Ferriani et al, 2009; Zaccaro et al, 2012). O’Leary and colleagues (2011), in the first theoretical contribution that explicitly investigates the relationship between MTM and teams productivity, propose the existence of an inverted curvilinear relationship so that intermediate levels of MTM allow teams to gain higher productivity because they push team members to develop better team work practices and to pay more attention to the way they allocate their time In their empirical study of knowledge-intensive teams, Cummings and Haas (2012) found that multiple team membership was positively related to team performance; such result is consistent with Chan (2014) who studied engineering project teams
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