Multiple teams, multiple projects, multiple groups at the intersection of (multiple) research fields: A bibliometric study

Abstract

Multi-teaming is a concept studied across a variety of disciplines. While using a bibliometric approach on 255 research papers extracted from Web of Science, we aimed to depict the architecture of the multi-teaming concept across academic disciplines and time. Results of citation, co-citation and bibliographic coupling analyses identified four major fields looking at the concept of multi-teaming. The fields emerged over time from fragmentation to integration and acknowledging similarities. We identify gaps and propose (multi)-disciplinary research ideas that can benefit the field of multi-teaming.

Empowering leadership during the COVID-19 outbreak: Implications for work satisfaction and effectiveness in organizational teams

“…With teams established as a core and versatile unit for organizing work, this organization proceeded by introducing organizational constructs to aggregate multiple teams. The main reason for this organizational design was the pursuit of agility (Bundtzen and Hinrichs, 2021) and optimal use of human resources within the organization (Meslec et al, 2023). Based on the results of our study, we infer that this setup aimed toward agility also brought resilience.…”

“…Modern organizations increasingly rely on teams and multiteam systems to perform effectively and stimulate autonomous work (Meslec et al, 2023), and they tend to change their leadership approaches from hierarchical forms to more participative and empowering ones. Leadership support is a key antecedent for the effectiveness of organizational teams as it impacts job crafting and is a key job resource for employees (Cortellazzo et al, 2019;Fodor et al, 2021;Tummers and Bakker, 2021).…”

Navigating multiple team membership: A review and redirection of its influence on effectiveness outcomes

“…Taken together, our review advances MTM theory by providing a nuanced understanding of MTM's influence on effectiveness. Earlier reviews discussed the MTM-effectiveness relationship within a broader framing of determinants, outcomes, and experiences of multiteaming, while focusing on boundary conditions to make sense of the observed complex relationship (Margolis, 2020) or identified the vast array of disciplines interested in studying MTM, while highlighting some of the key theories in MTM research through a bibliometric overview (Meslec et al, 2023). We analyze the MTM literature through a team lens (Hollenbeck et al, 2012;Mathieu et al, 2017) sion that identified two broad perspectives to explain MTM outcomes -namely, the social network and attention perspec tive and the resource and demands perspective -to delineate four categories of processes that account for how MTM's influence occurs.…”

“…(2011) proposed the countervailing consequences of MTM for individual and team learning and productivity. Scholars across disciplines ranging from Social Psychology to Industrial Engineering and Computer Science have taken an interest in MTM (Meslec et al., 2023). Initial work studied the effect of specific MTM structures such as employees' number of concurrent teams (i.e., MTM number) on individual and team effectiveness (e.g., Bertolotti et al., 2015; Chan, 2014; Cummings & Haas, 2012).…”

“…These findings suggest that certain individuals are more likely to thrive in MTM settings, and future research is advised to examine other person-related factors and how they manifest in teams by looking into the role team compositional features (e.g., demographic and personality diversities) play in (in)effective multiteaming. This is especially true because existing work on MTM has been concentrated in knowledge-intensive contexts (e.g.,Cummings & Haas, 2012;Meslec et al, 2023) and disregarded performance differences are likely within their different sectors including engineering and construction, IT, and healthcare, suggesting that these other sources of potential variance remain untapped. Whether scholars' interest is in knowledge-based industries or not, it is imperative to direct attention to how MTM's performance implications potentially vary across study populations.…”