Time the Surge: Theorizing and Examining Team Pacing in Multiple-Membership Contexts
研究了多重成员身份（员工同时参与多个项目）如何影响团队工作节奏，发现核心成员平均多重成员身份越高，项目活动冲刺越晚，但共享外部项目重叠可缓解此效应，且冲刺时机影响效率。
Pacing has long been critical for understanding team work patterns. As organizations increasingly embrace multiple memberships, with workers engaged in different concurrent projects, it becomes important to understand how team pacing is uniquely shaped in such contexts. Extending beyond prior theories with single-membership assumptions, we theorize a new perspective on how team pacing is influenced by multiple memberships—contexts typically characterized by non-coinciding project portfolios across members. Based on this theorizing, we examined a large-scale dataset comprising over 1.6 million entries of project activities involving 1,712 individuals across 415 team projects, and found that higher average multiple memberships among core members delayed the timing of a project’s activity surge. This surge-delaying effect was mitigated, however, when project members shared greater external project overlap. An additional experiment revealed that the reduced perceived feasibility of holistic optimization was an important psychological mechanism underlying the surge-delaying effect. Furthermore, we found that projects with longer time spans were less likely to experience a surge, but for those that did, surge timing had implications for efficiency: projects with either a markedly early surge (i.e., initial phase) or a markedly late surge (i.e., final phase) exhibited greater temporal procedural efficiency than those with an intermediate-phase surge.