Imagine you are at a high-stakes carnival but instead of being a spectator, you are the lead juggler. The catch is that you aren’t just part of one act, instead, you are juggling for five different teams simultaneously and the trapeze artists, the clowns and the lion tamers all expect your full attention at the exact same moment.
This is the reality of Multiple Team Membership (MTM), a work design that now affects the vast majority of knowledge workers. In a comprehensive study from 2026, researchers Helene Tenzer and her colleagues explored the “lived struggles” of employees who feel they simply “can’t split themselves in two”. By conducting 81 in-depth interviews at “Eurodrive,” a European automotive giant, they uncovered how people survive this “zero-sum game” where one team’s gain of your time is inevitably another team’s loss.
The core argument is that in these high-pressure, “agile” environments, employees face a profound dilemma: they must choose between self-preservation and the needs of their coworkers. To avoid drowning in work, many turn to “job crafting” which is the act of taking the initiative to reshape their own tasks and roles. While most research focuses on “approach crafting” (taking on new challenges), this study highlights the urgent necessity of avoidance crafting, like pulling an “emergency brake” on a runaway train, employees use this to stop the “emotional exhaustion” that comes from being spread too thin.
The researchers identified three primary survival strategies used by corporate jugglers:
1. Eliminating Tasks: Outright rejecting lower-priority work or “postponing” it until it is effectively abandoned.
2. Reducing Task Investment: Applying the 80/20 rule when deciding that a “good enough” basic version is better than a perfect one that would take too long. For example, making simple “engineers’ slides” for a presentation instead of polished “consulting slides”.
3. Scheduling Tasks: Creating “fortresses” of uninterrupted time blocks in their calendars. This helps them “drill into a thick board” by focusing on one complex topic at a time rather than losing energy by switching teams every ten minutes.
However, the study finds that these strategies come with “social costs”. Teamwork is interdependent, when you drop a task, it doesn’t just disappear but usually lands on a coworker’s desk or it creates a “bottleneck” that stalls the whole team’s progress. The researchers discovered two distinct “pathways” for how people handle this friction.
In the Self-Oriented Pathway, the employee acts like a “Lone Wolf”. They decide to drop tasks unilaterally and announce it as a fixed fact. When coworkers plead for help, citing collective goals or their own stress, the Lone Wolf disregards the resistance and proceeds anyway. While this is great for the individual’s well-being, it often leaves a trail of enormous frustration and anger among teammates.
In contrast, the Prosocial Pathway sees the employee as a “Diplomatic Negotiator”. Instead of making demands, they offer suggestions and invite their coworkers to a discussion. They
might say, “I’m overloaded, if we prioritize this together, what can wait?”. By treating the conflict as a shared puzzle and compromising, they internalize part of the burden, maintaining cooperation even while they protect their own limits.
While the methodology was rigorous, using iterative coding and “member reflections” where they showed the results back to employees to ensure accuracy, the study does have limitations. It focused on a single company and culture. In more “group-focused” or “collectivist” cultures, the social pressure to never say “no” might make the Self-Oriented path impossible to follow. The data was collected mostly during the hybrid-work era, where an explosion of digital meetings intensified the feeling of being spread thin.
Ultimately, this research suggests that being a “good employee” in the modern world isn’t about being a martyr who says yes until they collapse. It is about being someone who knows their limits and has the social skills to negotiate them. For organizations, the message is clear: stop assigning people to too many teams and start fostering a “psychologically safe” climate where people can talk about their workloads before they hit the emergency brake.
Food for Thought: If we accept that “self-preservation” is a necessary survival skill in the modern workplace, should organizations stop rewarding “heroic” overcommitment and instead start training employees on how to say “no” prosocially? How would your team react if you unilaterally announced you were applying the 80/20 rule to your next major deadline?
References
- Tenzer, H., Hoegl, M., Tims, M., Yang, P., & Wütz, S. (2026). I can’t split myself in two (or five): Job crafting in highly demanding and interdependent work environments. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 0(0), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.70072