Role strain and role accumulation across multiple teams

The moderating role of employees' polychronic orientation

Bibliographic Data

ID12167130
AuthorsStefan Berger (0000-0003-1860-7954, Institute for Leadership and Human Resource Management University of St. Gallen St. Gallen Switzerland, corresponding author), Heike Bruch (0009-0006-8865-8967, Institute for Leadership and Human Resource Management University of St. Gallen St. Gallen Switzerland)
Year2021
Volume42
Issue7
Pages835-850
Publication date2021-04-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Organizational Behavior (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0894-3796 • E-ISSN: 1099-1379
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/job.2521
OpenAlexW3158319401
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited70

In many firms and industries, it is the norm rather than the exception to work in more than one team at the same time. Despite increased research interest in recent years, we do not fully understand when such multiple team membership (MTM) is “good” or “bad” for employees' perceptions of stress and exhaustion. In this article, we integrate the person–job fit framework with opposing views of the role theory literature (i.e., role strain and role accumulation) to propose that an employee's personal reaction to working in multiple simultaneous teams decisively depends on his or her polychronic orientation. We expect that individual MTM is related to increased role efficacy, but not to role stress, for employees with higher (rather than lower) polychronic orientation, thus reducing the perception of emotional exhaustion. The opposite pattern is hypothesized for multiteamers with lower polychronic orientation. We find support for the proposed conditional indirect effects in a sample of 341 German employees. Our findings highlight an employee's polychronic orientation as a stable and context‐independent contingency factor in the MTM–exhaustion linkage and hold important implications for organizations, as well as individual employees, who seek to deal more effectively with role multiplicity in MTM settings

Burnout · Context (archaeology · Contingency · Emotional exhaustion · Orientation (vector space · Perception · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior · Psychology · Social Psychology · Team Dynamics and Performance

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