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

Firms devoted to research and development and innovative activities intensively use teams to carry out knowledge intensive work and increasingly ask their employees to be engaged in multiple teams (e.g. R&D project teams) simultaneously. The literature has extensively investigated the antecedents of single teams performance, but has largely overlooked the effects of multiple team membership (MTM), i.e., the participation of a focal team’s members in multiple teams simultaneously, on the focal team outcomes. In this paper we examine the relationships between team performance, MTM, the use of collaborative technologies (instant messaging), and work-place social networks (external advice receiving). The data collected in the R&D unit of an Italian company support the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between MTM and team performance such that teams whose members are engaged simultaneously in few or many teams experience lower performance. We found that receiving advice from external sources moderated this relationship. When MTM is low or high, external advice receiving has a positive effect, while at intermediate levels of MTM it has a negative effect. Finally, the average use of instant messaging in the team also moderated the relationship such that at low levels of MTM, R&D teams whose members use instant messaging intensively attain higher performance while at high levels of MTM an intense use of instant messaging is associated with lower team performance. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications for innovative firms engaged in multitasking work scenarios.