Multiple Team Membership: Examining Time Concentration, Attention Residue, and Learning.

Employees in today’s organizations commonly work on several teams concurrently, a concept referred to as multiple team membership (MTM). Prior research has extensively focused on how the number of team memberships influences downstream consequences through stress-related mechanisms. In the present work, we examine how individuals’ time allocation across their teams (i.e., their MTM time concentration) influences their task, citizenship, and counterproductive performance through cognitive mechanisms (i.e., attention residue and learning). We examine our hypotheses drawing from two samples, specifically university researchers at a biomedical research institute (N = 236) and undergraduate students working in class teams (N = 478). We find that focusing one’s time on a few team memberships (i.e., high MTM time concentration) reduces attention residue but also learning. Further, we find that attention residue reduces task performance and increases counterproductive performance whereas learning increases task and citizenship  performance and decreases counterproductive performance.

Manuel Vaulont’s research examines recent trends in how individuals work covering topics such as alternative work arrangements, self-managed teams, and informal leadership. His work has been published in the leading management journals Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. The Wall Street Journal has covered his work on side-hustles.

Before his appointment to Northeastern University, Manuel was an Assistant Professor at HKUST Business School at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Manuel received his PhD in Management from Arizona State University. He received the 2020 Best Student Conference Paper Award from the Academy of Management’s Research Methods Division and currently serves as a member of the editorial board at Personnel Psychology.