More than just a number: Different conceptualizations of multiple team membership and their relationships with emotional exhaustion and turnover.

Many employees are members of multiple teams, and research suggests that this may profoundly affect their stress experiences and work outcomes. We argue that progress in this research area has been hampered by a lack of clarity about what multiple team membership (MTM) is and how to conceptualize it. Prevailing conceptualizations of MTM have focused on the total number of teams an individual is a member of (MTM number). We identify how frequently employees shift their attention between different team contexts (MTM switching) and the extent to which they prioritize one membership over all others (MTM coreness) as alternative conceptualizations that better capture MTM's consequences for individuals. Our analysis of 1,345 knowledge workers involved in 4,329 project teams shows that MTM number, MTM switching, and MTM coreness differ meaningfully in their antecedents and consequences. MTM switching and coreness (but not MTM number), respectively, relate positively and negatively to multiteamers' emotional exhaustion and subsequent turnover. The positive consequences of MTM coreness only occur, however, when multiteamers have prior work experience with the members of their teams (i.e., team member familiarity). These findings help to clarify the potential benefits and detriments of MTM and advance the growing literature in this area. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Resource leverage, resource depletion: A multilevel perspective on multiple team membership.

Multiple team membership (MTM) is a complex phenomenon that poses significant challenges for organizational research and practice. In this article, we delve into the multilevel nature of MTM, which has not received adequate research attention to date. We develop a resource-based framework that advances our understanding of the antecedents and productivity consequences of firm MTM, and the synergistic effects of individual MTM and firm MTM on an individual's emotional exhaustion. Using a sample of 19,803 employees from 145 German organizations, our analyses reveal that MTM is most prevalent in knowledge-intensive and understaffed firms, and that firm MTM has an inverted U-shaped (rather than a positive linear) relationship with subsequent firm productivity. In addition, we find that individual MTM and firm MTM interactively shape individual stress perceptions, such that positive linkages between individual MTM and emotional exhaustion are significant only in firms with higher (but not lower) firm MTM. Together, these findings suggest that MTM has the potential to lead to firm-level productivity gains but, at the same time, may take a toll on individual employees' well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The dynamic relationship between multiple team membership and individual job performance in knowledge-intensive work.

Many employees in modern, knowledge-based organizations are concurrently involved in more than one team at the same time. This study investigated whether a within-person change in such individual multiple team membership (MTM) may precede and may be predicted by changes in an employee's overall job performance. We examined this reciprocal relationship using longitudinal archival data from a large knowledge-intensive organization, comprising 1,875 employees and spanning 5 consecutive years. A latent change score model demonstrated that an increase in an employee's MTM was associated with a subsequent decrease in his or her overall job performance evaluations. By contrast, an increase in job performance was associated with a subsequent increase in an employee's MTM. Moreover, our results indicated that although an increase in an individual employee's MTM initially decreases his or her job performance, in the long run, this increase in MTM was associated with higher job performance. Together, these results suggest a dynamic association between an individual employee's MTM and his or her overall job performance, such that these variables are mutually connected in a highly complex manner over time.