In today’s hyper-competitive and dynamic environment, organizations are called on to deliver faster and higher quality products than ever before. In response to this trend, employees are often concurrently working on multiple project teams that may be comprised of geographically dispersed team members. This work arrangement, which we refer to as Multiple Team Membership (MTM), has advantages in that employees can leverage knowledge across projects and use gaps in time and tasks in one project to accomplish tasks related to other projects. Despite these advantages, use of MTM poses several challenges. In particular, working across different projects and teams with varying cognitive demands beyond a certain point can take a toll on an individual’s ability to focus, solve problems, and be creative. For example, individuals may have less time to exploit and explore information available from different teams, reducing their chances of learning from the different teams on which they work.

The goal of this research is to examine the effect of working across concurrent projects on individual performance and creativity.  Specifically, we ask – at what point do the benefits of MTM cease to become beneficial and begin to hinder employee performance and creativity? Further, we examine how MTM affects individual project knowledge, variety of sources utilized to arrive at a solution, and workload. The research findings are expected to help organizations where individuals work in multiple teams manage such teams to produce better outcomes.

Authors: Prof. M. B. Watson-Manheim, University of Illinois at Chicago, Prof. M. Ahuja, University of Louisville, Prof. P. Rahmati, University of Georgia