How Many Teams should we Manage at Once? The Effect of Multiple Team Membership, Collaborative Technologies, and Polychronicity on Team Performance

This study explores the relationship between multiple team membership or ‘multi-teaming’ (the extent to which team members are simultaneously engaged in several teams in a given period of time and switch between different teams in a single work day), the performance of single teams, the intensity of use and perceptions of usefulness of collaborative technologies, and team members individual preferences for managing multiple tasks simultaneously (individual polychronicity). Drawing on theoretical work on multiple team membership (MTM) and theories of attention and knowledge acquisition, we argue that the number of MTMs has an inverted U-shaped relationship with team performance while the team average daily MTM is negatively related to the focal team performance. We also propose that the intensity of use of collaborative technologies will moderate the above relationships so that at low levels of MTM it will help teams to attain higher performance while at high levels of MTM it will reduce teams performance. Conversely, variance in collaborative technologies’ perceptions of uselfulness will moderate negatively the above relationships. Finally, we expect teams whose members are more polychronic to attain better performance in a multi-teaming context. We are exploring these issues through a field study based on quantitative and qualitative data collected in an Italian consulting firm that operates in the field of Business Intelligence Systems.