It can be assumed that even without the proposition of MTM for any company that the longer an employee is working in an organization the more familiar they'd become overall. Whether or not they've had direct experience in another portion of a company wouldn't limit them to getting the task procedures, work goals, or structure of any other team. High-tenure employees typically have already had ample amount of time to get familiar with a large number of colleagues, supervisors, and/or subordinates over time. In short, organizational tenure may reduce MTM's potentially detrimental consequences for perceived role ambiguity among these employees.
However, employees with shorter organizational tenure, should be less familiar with the company's culture, regulations, and procedures for task accomplishment. In consequence, these employees may find it difficult to adapt to and prioritize multiple simultaneous teams's demands and activities, especially when they can only spend smaller amounts of their time working within each team. Therefore, when the situation arises for high MTM, these employees may not have sufficient resources to fully grasp the diverse expectations or be able to recognize the potential similiarities between their tasks across different teams. It can be anticipated that higher MTM will create more role ambiguity perceptions for employees with relatively low organizational tenure. Company tenure can moderate the positive relationship between an employee's multiple team membership and his/her role ambiguity. This relationship is significant only among employees with lower (rather than higher) organizational tenure.
While these types of team members can benefit organizations, they can also put significant pressure on individuals that discover they have more work and challenges to face. Companies using this approach are responsible for ensuring that they are setting reasonable expectations to be fulfilled. This tactic can vary based on those participating as well. Someone with a limited concept of the company and its responsiblities can becomed strained and retract from their duties. However, someone with the concept of expansion and growth set in their mindset, will lean towards viewing participating on this team as an opportunity to access new expertise.
It can be seen as either a positive or negative when it comes to the selection process of the individuals for the team. The support and requirement to understand how they view this new challenge could be time consuming initially which could be off-putting in regards to creating the team in the first place. Given the industry and its turn-over rate it can seem like there isn't much room to implement MTM. Obviously, if employees are constantly changing then there's no foundation for such a strategy to stand on.
Maximizing skillsets fluctuates and it can be difficult to find those who are interested in participation whether they've been with the company for a short or a long period of time. Comfortability can lower the scope of opportunity for the team to be brought together and flourish.