Multiple Team Membership, Performance, and Confidence in Estimation Tasks

Multiple team membership (MTM) is a form of work organization extensively used nowadays to flexibly deploy human resources across multiple simultaneous projects. Individual members bring in their cognitive resources in these multiple teams and at the same time use the resources and competencies developed while working together. We test in an experimental study whether working in MTM as compared to a single team yields more individual performance benefits in estimation tasks. Our results fully support the group-to-individual (G-I) transfer of learning, yet the hypothesized benefits of knowledge variety and broader access to meta-knowledge relevant to the task in MTM as compared to single teams were not supported. In addition, we show that individual estimates improve only when members are part of groups with low or average collective estimation errors, while confidence in individual estimates significantly increases only when the collective confidence in the group estimates is average or high. The study opens valuable venues for using the dynamic model of G-I transfer of learning to explore individual learning in MTM.

Automated summary

MTM is a form of work organization that flexibly deploys human resources across multiple simultaneous projects, where individual members bring in their cognitive resources and use the resources developed while working together. The study supports the group-to-individual transfer of learning and suggests that individual estimates improve only in groups with low or average collective estimation errors.