{"id":21317,"date":"2017-12-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global2020prd.wpengine.com\/insights\/the-rise-of-multiple-cross-silo-virtual-teams\/"},"modified":"2020-05-21T13:05:58","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T13:05:58","slug":"the-rise-of-multiple-cross-silo-virtual-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.global-integration.com\/insights\/the-rise-of-multiple-cross-silo-virtual-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise of multiple, cross-silo virtual teams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How many teams are you part of at work? Professionals are now members of four different teams on average, according to our benchmarking survey of over 4,000 employees in Europe, US, Asia and the Middle East. \u00a0Four teams with say 3-5 key goals each means 12-20 key initiatives to juggle and try to stay on top of.<\/p>\n<p>These multiple teams are also now more likely to be horizontal, cross-silo and virtual teams.\u00a0 In digitally mature companies, more than 70% of executives say their companies are organized around cross-functional teams (vs. only 28% of companies at the start of their digital journey) according to a <a href=\"https:\/\/sloanreview.mit.edu\/projects\/achieving-digital-maturity\"><u>2017 report from MIT and Deloitte Digital<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>These new trends have a serious impact on people\u2019s sense of clarity in terms of what their key goals are, what to prioritize and how to handle the inevitable ambiguity and conflict.<\/p>\n<p>The good news is that <u>studies<\/u> have shown that working on multiple teams can have many benefits, such as<a href=\"#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\">[i]<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>facilitating the flow of knowledge and best practices between teams<\/li>\n<li>building boundary spanning networks<\/li>\n<li>encouraging individuals and teams to seek out more efficient work practices<\/li>\n<li>improving workers\u2019 performance<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But only up to a point.\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/ssrn.com\/abstract=1474336\"><u>Studies<\/u><\/a> have found that the increase in productivity plateaus and then turns negative as the number of team memberships\u2019 increases and the clarity issues above kick in.\u00a0 As well as increased ambiguity, over-cooperation is likely to become a problem.<\/p>\n<p>There doesn\u2019t seem to be any universal magic number of teams to be part of \u2013 the performance peak depends on factors such as the organizational incentive systems, geographic dispersion of the various teams, individual time related preferences and existing networks of relationships. The variety as well as number of teams can also have an impact \u2013 with a large variety increasing learning (again up to a point), but decreasing productivity.<\/p>\n<p>What is clear is that unless we\u2019re careful, psychologists warn us that being a part of a number of teams \u201cimposes competing demands on members\u2019 attention and commitment, which can lead to information overload, distress, and less than optimal performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels<a href=\"#_edn2\" name=\"_ednref2\">[ii]<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To mitigate this, it is imperative that we take ownership of our roles and goals within each team.\u00a0 If we are on multiple teams, we are the only ones who have the full perspective of everything we have going on.\u00a0 Therefore, it\u2019s up to us to clarify what our priorities should be, to highlight to others if certain goals from different teams clash and to be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity.<\/p>\n<p>Once the jurisdiction of senior managers and above, this means that managing multiple stakeholders is now a lot more common further down the organization.\u00a0 But are we giving people the skills they need to perform this complex task?<\/p>\n<p>Check out an interactive graphic of our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.global-integration.com\/virtual-teams-training\/\">learning paths and training module contents<\/a> &#8211; including multiple team management.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref1\" name=\"_edn1\">[i]<\/a> van de Brake, H. J., Walter, F., Rink, F., Essens, P., &amp; van der Vegt, G. (2016) Multiple Team Membership and Individual Performance in Knowledge-Intensive Work. Academy of Management Proceedings, 1, p. 10488.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref2\" name=\"_edn2\">[ii]<\/a> Maynard, M. T., Mathieu, J. E., Rapp, T. L., &amp; Gilson, L. L. (2012) Something(s) old and something(s) new: Modeling drivers of global virtual team effectiveness. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 33: 342-365.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How many teams are you part of at work? Professionals are now members of four different teams on average, according [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":21318,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-21317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","type-blog","training-agile-and-digital","training-virtual-teams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.6 (Yoast SEO v27.6) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The rise of multiple, cross-silo virtual teams - Global Integration<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How many teams are you part of at work? 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