Multiple Team Membership, Turnover, and On-Time Delivery: Evidence from Construction Services

Firms who want to compete in dynamic markets are finding that they must build more agile operations to ensure success. One way for a firm to increase organizational agility is to allocate employees to multiple project teams, simultaneously—a practice known as multiple team membership (MTM). MTM allows for the potential of improved project performance through additional flexibility and learning, however, there is also the possibility of negative performance effects from MTM due to overwork, coordination neglect, and problems with resource blocking and starving. In this paper we theorize about these conflicting predictions prior to building and testing an empirical model that draws on a unique dataset consisting of 1,503 construction projects in the Europe District of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Although USACE is a government entity, it operates similar to for-profit construction services companies. We find that MTM shows an inverted U-shaped relationship with on-time project delivery whereby it is first related to improved performance and then later related to worse performance. To extend our exploration we examine whether MTM makes teams more fragile operationally. We do this by investigating whether teams that experience turnover are more susceptible to the negative effects of MTM. Our empirical results support this proposition and deliver additional insight that the effect is driven by unanticipated turnover. Our findings provide understanding into the benefits and the difficulty in building a more agile workforce.