Who Benefits from Multiple Team Membership? An Investigation of the Emergent Costs and Benefits of MTM Across Levels

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. The authors examine how the system-level MTM structure differentially affects individuals and teams that hold different positions in that structure. The authors explore these questions through an agent-based simulation model in which they model an organization consisting of employees who form teams to complete projects. The authors show that higher levels of MTM can be beneficial to a system by providing the opportunity to dynamically reallocate human resources to where they are most needed at a given time – but, at the same time, they find that this benefit can be outweighed by the increase in coordination costs entailed by higher levels of individual multi-teaming. Second, and central to their cross-level focus, the authors find that the best performing teams and individuals in a system are generally those engaging in a level of multi-teaming that is higher than the average level of the system in which they are embedded. Taken together, these findings reveal a core tension between incentives at different levels of analysis: While teams and inividuals benefit from having higher than average levels of MTM within a given system, the system as a whole suffers as MTM levels increase. The authors discuss implications for organizational theory and managerial practice.