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).

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.

Abusive supervision and subordinate performance: Instrumentality considerations in the emergence and consequences of abusive supervision.

Drawing from moral exclusion theory, this article examines outcome dependence and interpersonal liking as key boundary conditions for the linkage between perceived subordinate performance and abusive supervision. Moreover, it investigates the role of abusive supervision for subordinates' subsequent, objective work performance. Across 2 independent studies, an experimental scenario study (N = 157; Study 1) and a time-lagged field study (N = 169; Study 2), the negative relationship between perceived subordinate performance and abusive supervision was found to hinge on a supervisor's outcome dependence on subordinates but not on a supervisor's liking of subordinates. Furthermore, Study 2 demonstrated (a) a negative association between abusive supervision and subordinates' subsequent objective performance and (b) a conditional indirect effect of perceived performance on subsequent objective performance, through abusive supervision, contingent on the degree of outcome dependence, although these relationships did not reach conventional significance levels when controlling for prior objective performance. All in all, the findings highlight the role of instrumentality considerations in relation to abusive supervision and promote new knowledge on both origins and consequences of such supervisory behavior.

Harming high performers: a social comparison perspective on interpersonal harming in work teams.

This study developed a multilevel model of the interpersonal harming behavior associated with social comparison processes in work teams. We tested this model using temporally lagged data from a sample of student teams (Study 1) and cross-sectional data from a sample of work teams in a telecommunication services company (Study 2). In both studies, social relations analyses revealed that in teams with less cooperative goals, comparison to a higher performing team member was positively associated with interpersonal harming behavior, but only when expectations of future performance similarity to that member were low. The interactive relationship of social comparison and expected future performance similarity with interpersonal harming was buffered, however, in teams with more cooperative goals.

The relationships among asymmetry in task dependence, perceived helping behavior, and trust.

Social relations analyses involving 132 working relationships among 60 individuals from 29 teams revealed that an increase in a team member's task dependence on another team member was associated with higher levels of perceived help from and interpersonal trust in that specific team member, provided the other member was highly task dependent on the focal member. The degree to which an actor perceived a relationship with a partner to be helpful partially mediated the relationship between task dependence and trust. These findings highlight the importance of attending to asymmetries in task dependence and provide valuable insights into mechanisms that can explain the development of trust in organizational work teams.