Energizing multiteam organizations: the organizational leadership, climate, and performance of MTM structures

Multiteaming is not limited to single departments or highly innovative industries anymore, but is starting to spread across entire organizations from all kinds of industries (e.g., Barley, Bechky, & Milliken, 2017). I refer to this organizational phenomenon as multiteam organization (MTO). Drawing on social system perspective (Katz & Kahn, 1978), I focus on the relationships between the multiple teams in such organizations (i.e., motivational capacities and coordination challenges) and investigate how multiple team membership (MTM) structure affects the climate and performance of MTOs. Moreover, I examine the role of organizational leadership (i.e., hierarchical and shared organizational leadership) in fostering a productive and dynamic climate. I apply multiple regression and bootstrapping analyses in a sample of 82 German firms, in order to empirically test my conceptual model. The results provide strong support to my theoretical reasoning: only if both, hierarchical and shared organizational leadership are strongly pronounced, an increasing level of organizational multiteaming yields beneficial effects on an organization’s climate and performance.