The Connectivity Paradox of Flexible Team Arrangements

Organizations rely on team-based structures to promote connectivity and performance. Yet, recent research suggests that increasingly flexible team arrangements, characterized by multiple team membership (MTM) and fluid team membership (FTM), may simultaneously foster and undermine social capital in organizations. To address this connectivity paradox of flexible team arrangements, we integrate research on MTM and FTM and develop multilevel theory linking these practices to social capital and performance at the firm and individual levels. We test our theory in two complementary studies. Study 1 uses fine-grained data from a knowledge-intensive organization (n = 3,690 employees) to examine our individual-level predictions. Study 2 tests the full model with multi-source data from 106 organizations (n = 15,342 employees). Across both studies, MTM is positively related to individual social capital and indirectly to individual performance, whereas FTM shows negative associations. Study 2 further shows that flexible team arrangements (i.e., firm-level structures based on MTM and FTM) are related positively to organizational social capital and indirectly to firm performance. Our findings contribute to research on teams in general and flexible team arrangements in particular, and hold important implications for social capital theory.