UC Irvine

Many knowledge workers are members of multiple concurrent teams. This arrangement of multiple team membership (MTM) increases demands for people’s attention, but an understanding of how individuals allocate their attention to multiple teams and what the consequences are of attention allocation to different teams is lacking. In this dissertation, I start by reviewing the attention literature (Chapter 2) and examine MTM as a context in which individuals allocate their attention to multiple teams. I conceptualize attention in MTM that is distinctive from attention as previously studied in laboratories or attention as a mechanism of organizational decision making (Chapter 3). Based on the conceptual foundation, I conducted two empirical studies that explain antecedents and consequences of day-to-day focus on team projects (Chapter 4) and employee performance outcome of stable membership over a year (Chapter 5). I found that salience of the project and perceived general importance of the project to one’s own goal at work predict one’s focus on projects on a daily level. I also found that having stable membership with one’s primary team predicts better performance after six months. This dissertation provides a theoretical foundation and empirical support for studying attention in the context of MTM. It also contributes to teams literature by shedding light on members’ perspective as they navigate their work in multiple teams.