Multiple project team membership and performance: Empirical evidence from engineering project teams

Abstract

Individuals are increasingly involved in more than one project team. This implies that an employee simultaneously has multiple memberships in these project teams, a phenomenon known as multiple team membership (MTM). Previous, predominantly theoretical studies have acknowledged the impacts that MTM has on performance but very scarce empirical evidence exists. The aim of this study is to provide empirical support for some of these theoretical claims using data collected from 435 team members in 85 engineering project teams in South Africa. Results show that MTM has an inverted-U shaped relationship with individual performance and a positive linear relationship with team performance. When a person is working in multiple project teams simultaneously, he/she may encounter more diverse sources of ideas across all teams and thus enhances his/her innovative performance. However, as the number of MTM increases, the negative effect of task switching and fragmented attention will negatively impact on individual performance. At the project team level, a large number of MTM in a focal team allows the team members to integrate diverse sources of knowledge and resources into the focal team. This study also found that individuals' emotional skills and cognitive skills impact on individual performance. It is recommended to programme and project portfolio managers, who often are involved in scheduling human resources to multiple projects, to acknowledge both the positive and negative impacts of MTM on performance. Moreover, in high MTM situations, project team members with high emotional and cognitive skills should be selected.

The dynamic relationship between multiple team membership and individual job performance in knowledge‐intensive work

“…Moreover, our 5‐year longitudinal data allowed us to examine the directionality of the MTM‐performance linkage, thus reconciling previous theoretical claims that have alternatively cast MTM as an antecedent (e.g., Chan, ) or as a consequence (e.g., Cummings & Haas, ) of an employee's job performance. Beyond the complex MTM‐to‐performance linkages discussed before, our within‐person results show that increasing performance may subsequently promote an individuals' MTM as well.…”

“…Similar to prior research (e.g., Chan, ; Pluut et al, ), we measured an employee's MTM as the number of concurrent project teams in which he or she was actively involved. Contrary to this earlier work, however, we used archival data (rather than survey measures) to obtain a detailed indication of an individual employee's number of active team memberships.…”

“…We pit these competing perspectives against each other, using data from 1,875 knowledge workers. Whereas prior work has typically used cross‐sectional, between‐person designs to examine the association between MTM and performance‐related outcomes (e.g., Chan, ; Cummings & Haas, ; Pluut et al, ), we adopt a longitudinal, within‐person study design to investigate this linkage over time. This approach enables us to examine whether changes in an employee's overall job performance may relate to subsequent changes in his or her MTM (O'Leary, Mortensen, et al, ; O'Leary, Woolley, & Mortensen, ) and allows us to investigate potentially reciprocal relationships between these variables over time.…”

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

“…For instance, through multiple memberships, knowledge, best practices, and other resources can flow between R&D teams; however, the way individual members allocate their time across the different teams can influence single teams processes and pose serious challenges to their functioning. Because of the increasing evidence of innovative organizations adopting this form of organizing (Chan, 2014), exploring the relationships between MTM and team performance is therefore of both theoretical and practical importance (O'Leary et al, 2011;Tennenbaum et al, 2012). Moreover, the very few studies that focused on the topic of MTM offer us a puzzling picture that calls for additional and more nuanced understanding of how the belongingness of individuals to multiple teams simultaneously creates challenges in attaining high levels of team performance.…”

The Effect of Using Multi-Skilled Workforce on the Flexibility of Project Resource Scheduling and Project Costs

“…Hence why, project managers still need to have important competencies in project scheduling and staffing of human resources, especially when facing the problem of labour resource skills constraints (Chan, 2014). Burleson, Haas, Tucker et al (1998) made known to some multi-skilling strategies such as dual-skill strategy, four-skill strategy, four-skill-helpers strategy, and unlimited-skill strategy as means to prove the benefits of the multi-skilling concept.…”