The relationship between team performance and multiple team membership: the role of social networks and technology

Organizations increasingly use teams, both co-localized and distributed, to perform knowledge intensivetasks and face fast-pace environmental changes. Although their importance is widely acknowledged, agrowing body of evidences suggests that teams frequently face difficulties in fully realizing theirpotential, especially in situations where team members are distributed and interact mainly throughcollaborative technologies. The structure of social networks in which teams are embedded is consideredan important predictor of team performance even though, at a group level of analysis, empiricalevidence is still scant. Previous research has investigated the relationships between densecommunication-networ k structure in predicting performance in localized teams and started to link socialnetwork structures to some outcomes of distributed teams such as rapport, trust, ease of coordination.However, in distributed teams, dense communication and advice networks may be difficult to maintain,because team members need to avail themselves almost exclusively of communication technologies(Hinds, McGrath, 2006). Therefore, in this paper, we aim to further investigate the interplay betweentechnologies and the structure of work-related social networks and its effect on team performancecomparing distributed and collocated teams.Organizations increasingly use teams, both co-localized and distributed, to perform knowledge intensivetasks and face fast-pace environmental changes. Although their importance is widely acknowledged, agrowing body of evidences suggests that teams frequently face difficulties in fully realizing theirpotential, especially in situations where team members are distributed and interact mainly throughcollaborative technologies. The structure of social networks in which teams are embedded is consideredan important predictor of team performance even though, at a group level of analysis, empiricalevidence is still scant. Previous research has investigated the relationships between densecommunication-networ k structure in predicting performance in localized teams and started to link socialnetwork structures to some outcomes of distributed teams such as rapport, trust, ease of coordination.However, in distributed teams, dense communication and advice networks may be difficult to maintain,because team members need to avail themselves almost exclusively of communication technologies(Hinds, McGrath, 2006). Therefore, in this paper, we aim to further investigate the interplay betweentechnologies and the structure of work-related social networks and its effect on team performancecomparing distributed and collocated teams.We collected data on 73 R&D professionals, situated across 29 project teams (both co-located andgeographically distributed) and belonging to a multi-national world-leading corporation operating in thealternative energy industry. We collected data on the advice, communication, potential interaction workrelated complete networks Performance was measured by asking both team members and managers toevaluate the team outcomes in terms of quality of output, respect of budget, deadlines and clientsatisfaction. This work contributes to the social network as well as collaboration and distributed workliterature.