ABSTRACT
Present-day work organizations increasingly rely on team-based structures to achieve organizational performance objectives (e.g., Ilgen 1999).While in the early 1980s approximately 5 percent of US workers reported working in some sort of organizational team (Savoie 1998), that number was approaching 50 percent in the late 1990s (Stewart, Manz & Sims 1999). Underlying this proliferation is the belief that teams provide greater flexibility as well as increased knowledge and innovation (Kozlowski & Ilgen 2006). In terms of flexibility, teams allow organizational members to change and expand their task activities in order to assist each other, thus countering workload increases and unexpected events (Waller 1999). Teams can provide increased learning and innovation by enabling their members to transfer their knowledge and experiences from one activity or project to others on which they are concurrently working (e.g., Edmonson 1999). Such potential benefits, however, are dependent on team members’ willingness or propensity to shift between their tasks and activities, rather than choosing to work on each in a more separable or discrete manner. Consistent with the presumed importance of task-switching, Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro (2001: 356) conceptualized teams as ‘multitasking units that perform multiple processes simultaneously and sequentially to orchestrate goal-directed task work’.
