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

促进员工的福祉是当今组织的一个关键焦点，尤其是在协作越来越依赖于技术和涉及虚拟团队的情况下。虽然现有的研究探索了单个团队中员工的幸福感，但在理解多个团队中的一员如何影响组织中单个团队成员和团队的体验和整体幸福感方面存在差距。该项目解决了多团队成员（MTM）和福利之间的关系，这对组织生产力至关重要。在多个虚拟团队中导航的个人体验到“上下文多样性”。换句话说，他们在不同的技术、任务相关和社会心理环境之间移动。这包括使用不同的平台和新兴技术（例如，人工智能助推工具），面对不同的任务需求，以及在团队中体验不同程度的包容和心理安全。尽管这是一种常见的经历，但之前的研究并没有探讨团队环境的多样性是如何影响个人和整个团队的幸福感的，包括积极和消极的结果，比如兴奋或倦怠。本研究旨在整合团队、管理资讯系统和人力资源的学术观点，为MTM动力学提供更丰富的理论认识。这些成果将有助于改善工人的福祉，营造包容性的工作环境。该项目的具体目标是：a)了解当团队成员同时是多个团队的成员时，团队之间的技术，任务和社会心理多样性如何影响个人和团队的幸福感；b)帮助组织，经理和员工设计支持性的工作场所体验。该项目侧重于多个层次的分析：个人、单个团队和中介层，中介层被定义为跨组织内多个团队的有限空间。研究团队采用了一种混合方法，包括访谈，以捕捉知识工作者的多个团队成员的生活经验的整体观点，并开发一个理论模型，实验，以细粒度分析技术的支持，和调查，以确认我们提出的理论模型，以更好地捕捉任务和社会心理背景的多样性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.