Multiple team membership: current state of affairs and directions for future research

Abstract

Organizations are operating in environments that are highly dynamic and are faced with the challenge to adapt such that they maintain and even further increase their levels of performance and innovativeness. As a form of adaptation, many organizations changed the way in which they organize their work around teams. Nowadays we see more and more that employees are part of multiple teams (instead of single teams) at the same time and need to contribute to various tasks simultaneously. Reports are indicating that 65-95% of knowledge workers belong to more than one team at the same time (O’Leary, Mortensen & Woolley, 2011). This phenomena of being part of more than one team simultaneously has been defined as multiple-team membership (O’Leary et al. 2011). Other scholars such as Margolis (2019) have defined the concept in a broader way such as employees having membership interdependencies across teams. Despite the fact that multiple team membership is widely used as a form of structuring work in organizations, empirical research on the topic has only recently started to emerge. The seminal theoretical work of O’Leary et al., (2011) has placed the concept on the research agendas of both Organization Behavior and Project Management fields. The review conducted by Margolis (2019) identified 44 research articles connected to the topic of multiple-team membership. The