Who benefits from multiple team membership? An investigation of how the structure of MTM shapes team- and system-level performance

An increasing number of organizations have been adopting Multiple Team Membership (MTM), an organizational model in which individuals work concurrently in more than one team. Using agent-based simulation modeling, we examine the performance of teams within an organization’s MTM structure. We find that the best performing teams in an organization are those whose members engage in higher degrees of multi-teaming (i.e., are part of more teams) than the system average, whereas the worst performing teams in an organization are those whose members engage in lower degrees of multi-teaming than the system average. We observe that this phenomenon is driven by asymmetries in the opportunities for dynamic resource reallocation as a function of teams’ relative degrees of multi-teaming. We also reveal a core tension between incentives at different levels of analysis: While teams benefit from having members who engage in greater degrees of multi-teaming, the organization as a whole suffers when its constituents engage in greater degrees of multi-teaming. We discussimplications for organizational theory and managerial practice