The challenge‐hindrance literature suggests that employees are most likely to recognize a stressful situation as a positive challenge when they perceive the respective task requirements (a) as difficult but manageable and (b) as offering the potential for personal growth or gain (Lepine et al., 2005). Following this thought process, there are two important reasons why individual MTM may increase an employee’s work challenge perceptions.
First, work arrangements with high MTM typically are relatively demanding and difficult because they require individual employees to regularly reallocate their time and attention to different team tools, tasks, and technologies (Leroy, 2009; O’Leary et al., 2011b) and subject an employee to more diverse job requirements across various team settings (O’Leary et al., 2011a). Although this may increase an employee’s perceived job strain (Pluut et al., 2014), research also suggests that employees can learn how to be successful in managing these MTM demands over time (Van de Brake et al., 2018). An in‐depth qualitative study among 13 employees concurrently involved in multiple teams, for example, found that employees developed more efficient task and time management practices to ease the difficulties associated with multi‐teaming (Mortensen et al., 2007). In other words, the MTM literature suggests that employees may use various strategies to effectively navigate this type of work arrangement.
Consequently, employees may perceive situations with high MTM as difficult‐yet‐manageable, possibly evoking positive work challenge appraisals (see LePine et al., 2005). With lower MTM, by contrast, employees’ work demands are likely to be less diverse, difficult, and demanding (Pluut et al., 2014). As such, employees do not need to develop basic task‐strategies to successfully cope with their work arrangements and, thus, they are likely to perceive low‐MTM situations as less challenging than work arrangements with higher MTM.
Second, higher MTM may promote an employee’s perceived potential for personal growth and gain. As O’Leary et al. (2011a, p. 469) noted, MTM exposes an individual to diverse team contexts that allow for ‘concurrent and serendipitous variation in the information one has ready access to’. Employees with higher MTM are, therefore, in a unique position to sample information from multiple teams, to integrate this information into a new set of behavioral repertoires, and to flexibly apply this knowledge across a variety of team contexts (Lepine et al., 2005). Relatedly, such employees may experience distinct gains from their MTM as it provides them ‘with the opportunity to shape their careers by joining projects related to expertise they have or want to develop’ (Mortensen et al., 2007, p. 5). In contrast, employees with lower MTM may find it more difficult to directly access diverse teams’ information sources (i.e., beyond the confines of their immediate, relatively limited work environment). As such, these latter individuals are less likely to experience challenging opportunities for personal gain and growth at work, as compared with employees in high‐MTM arrangements.
Extending the prior argument, it's proposed that an individual employee’s MTM will indirectly relate to his or her tangible work behaviors, via the employee’s work challenge perceptions. When work circumstances offer opportunities for personal growth and career progress, in particular, employees are typically motivated to work hard and improve their skills (Hackman and Oldham, 1976; Nicholls, 1984). Accordingly, research has shown that appraising a work situation as challenging increases employees’ effort and productivity (Podsakoff et al., 2007), and, thus, positively relates with individual employees’ job performance (Amabile et al., 1996). Employees in less challenging task environments, by contrast, are generally less inclined to exert effort and improve their expertise and productivity, thus lowering these employee’s performance levels (Lepine et al., 2005).
The idea that multi-team members inject insight from various parts of the business doesn’t always work out in practice. This is because people tend to focus on the information everyone knows, even when their unique knowledge is key to achieving the team’s goal. What can you do to get around this issue? Telling people about this ‘common knowledge effect’ is a good first step, as just increasing people’s awareness of a bias can reduce its power. Not only does it provide the chance to share learnings across the business, but it also gives multi-team members insight into the priorities and political nuances of other teams – which can help them collaborate with each other more successfully.
To leverage these different understandings within teams, encourage teams to switch conversations around. Rather than assuming that everyone knows how things get done, regularly ask ‘how should we do this’ and question what works best based on people’s own experience in different teams. Facilitating team discussions so that people are encouraged to share their most relevant insights, and moving the conversation on when the team is stuck discussing what everybody already knows, will also help.
Context switching which is when someone has to shift between two or more team contexts or tasks within a short time span. The important thing to consider is how often this shift is required to happen. With proper scheduling and enough notice request research shows could be up to as many times a six a day, but will vary also the degree of difference in team contexts.
In conclusion, the best way to effectively use multi-teaming is to provide a window of time and slight room for error upon switching responsibilities. If this is successful attained the functionality of business will flow like natural.