Belonging to several teams: the cost of switching
Someone can belong to several teams without being able to meet their demands simultaneously. The management question is specific: how can organisations share expertise without multiplying the switches that undermine task execution?
What the literature establishes
Michael B. O’Leary, Mark Mortensen and Anita Williams Woolley (2011, Academy of Management Review) propose a theoretical model of how simultaneous membership of several teams affects productivity and learning. This arrangement can support knowledge flows and resource utilisation, but it also entails coordination costs and shifts in attention. The article advances propositions: it does not establish an optimal number of teams per person.
Attention does not switch instantly
Sophie Leroy (2009, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) experimentally examines “attention residue” when people move from one task to another. Her findings show that some attention can remain attached to the previous task, particularly when it is unfinished, and impair performance on the next one. This individual mechanism helps explain why availability in a calendar does not guarantee cognitive availability for another team.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that everyone should be assigned to just one team. These studies do not justify that rule: sharing people can also make scarce expertise accessible and create learning opportunities. The more relevant trade-off concerns fragmented contributions and the competing demands an organisation places on the same person. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot resolve
A theoretical model of multiple team membership and experiments on task switching do not amount to causal evidence at the level of workplace teams. They cannot establish a universal ceiling on assignments or quantify the cost of switching in a particular organisation. A workload schedule therefore remains incomplete if it adds up hours without recording the context changes required to deliver them.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR’s “Team Performance” programme, one possible exercise in Sion is to track a shared function: technical expertise in hydropower, healthcare coordination, wine-production support or coordination of Alpine tourism activities. Over an observation period defined in advance, record every team switch absent from the schedule and every commitment delivered after its agreed deadline. Then test protected contribution periods, with an explicit rule for emergencies, and compare unplanned switches per working day and the proportion of commitments delivered on time. The observation periods belong to a local protocol, not a scientific prescription; also recording workload and emergencies helps interpret differences without automatically attributing them to the intervention. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Sion
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