Collaborative Research: Multiple Team Membership (MTM) through Technology: A path towards individual and team wellbeing?

Promoting the wellbeing of employees is a critical focus in today's organizations, especially as collaboration increasingly relies on technologies and involves virtual teams. While existing research explores the wellbeing of employees in single teams, there's a gap in understanding how being part of multiple teams influences the experiences and overall wellbeing of individual team members and teams in organizations. This project addresses the relationship between multiple team membership (MTM) and wellbeing, crucial for organizational productivity. Individuals navigating multiple virtual teams experience “context variety.” In other words, they move between diverse technological, task-related, and socio-psychological contexts. This includes using different platforms and emerging technologies (e.g., AI nudging tools), facing varying task requirements, and experiencing different levels of inclusion and psychological safety across teams. Despite being a common experience, prior research hasn't explored how team context variety influences individuals’ and the entire team’s wellbeing, including both positive and negative outcomes, such as excitement or burnout. This research aims to integrate scholarly perspectives on teams, management information systems, and human resources, contributing to a richer theoretical understanding of MTM dynamics. The outcomes will contribute to improving workers' wellbeing and fostering inclusive work environments. The specific goals of this project are to: a) understand how technology, task, and socio-psychological variety across teams affect individual and team wellbeing when team members are simultaneously members of multiple teams, and b) to help organizations, managers, and employees design supportive workplace experiences. The project focuses on multiple levels of analyses: the individual, the single team, and the meso-level, which is defined as a liminal space across multiple teams within an organization. The research team relies on a mixed method approach, including interviews to capture a holistic view of the lived experiences of multiple team membership of knowledge workers and develop a theoretical model, experiments to granularly analyze technology affordances, and surveys to confirm the proposed theoretical model we develop and to better capture variety in task and socio-psychological contexts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.