Two Channels of a Dual Mandate: Campus Geography and Administrative Coordination in the Teams-Mediated Interaction Network of a Hybrid Academic Unit

In the modern workplace, we often assume that a team's strength comes from the work it does together. If a group of people shares a project, a goal, or a daily routine, we expect them to form a tight-knit circle, talking constantly and solving problems side by side. This idea is so common that it feels like a law of nature: shared tasks create shared bonds. But what happens when a team is asked to do two very different jobs at the same time? In many universities, staff are expected to both teach students and conduct applied research for local industries. They sit in the same offices, belong to the same department, and report to the same manager. Yet, the question remains: does the pressure to do two jobs blend their interactions into one big, busy network, or does it split them into separate worlds? This is the puzzle a team of researchers set out to solve by looking not at what people said they did, but at the digital footprints they left behind in their daily communication.

The researchers focused on a specific department at a university of applied sciences in Finland. This institution has a unique legal requirement: its staff must deliver professional education while simultaneously conducting research and development that helps the local region grow. The team in question consisted of nineteen members and one manager, all working on the same business degree program. To understand how this dual mission played out in real life, the scientists turned to Microsoft Teams, the software the university uses for all its work communication. They did not ask the staff to fill out surveys or guess who they talked to. Instead, they looked at the "Collaborators" view, a feature that automatically lists the people a user has contacted most frequently over the last four weeks. This list acts like a snapshot of a person's most important professional relationships.

The team gathered this data twice: once just before the winter break at the end of the autumn semester, and again a few weeks into the spring semester. For every person who agreed to participate, the researchers took their list of top contacts and asked them to explain what each relationship was about. Was the contact for teaching a class, for working on a research project, or for something else? Was the person they were talking to a member of their own team, a colleague elsewhere in the university, or someone completely outside the institution? By combining the digital list with the human explanation, the researchers could map exactly how the team's two mandates—teaching and research—were actually being carried out.

The results revealed a striking separation that defied the usual expectations of how teams work. The researchers found that the two missions did not mix at all within the team itself. Not a single one of the ninety-seven interactions recorded between members of the team was about research and development. Every single conversation between colleagues inside the group was about teaching, student work, or general administration. The research mission, which was supposed to be a collective goal for the whole department, happened entirely outside the team's internal circle. When the staff did talk about research, they were almost always talking to people outside the university. In fact, nearly two-thirds of all the connections the team had with people outside the institution were for research purposes. Inside the university, but outside their own team, only about eleven percent of the connections were for research. This created two distinct channels: one for teaching that flowed through the team and the wider university, and another for research that flowed almost exclusively out of the university entirely.

This separation meant that the team's internal unity did not come from working together on projects. Since no one was doing research together inside the group, the research mandate could not be the glue holding them together. Instead, the researchers discovered that the team stayed connected because of where people sat and who organized their work. The team was spread across two different campuses in two different cities. The data showed that people were far more likely to talk to colleagues on their own campus than to those on the other side of the city, even though they were all part of the same team. Physical proximity, it turned out, was a stronger force than the shared identity of the department.

Even more critical to the team's structure was the manager. In the network of interactions, the manager was the single most important person, acting as the central hub that connected everyone else. The manager did not teach the same classes or work on the same research projects as the staff; their role was purely to coordinate. When the researchers simulated what would happen if the manager were removed from the network, the team immediately fell apart. In the first snapshot of the data, the team was a single, connected group only because the manager was in the middle of it. Without that central coordinating figure, the staff members would have been split into isolated groups, unable to reach one another. This showed that the team's cohesion was not built on the staff collaborating with each other, but on everyone reporting to and coordinating through a single leader.

The study also looked at how things changed as the university moved from the autumn semester to the spring semester. Between the two observation periods, the number of connections between team members dropped significantly. The team went from being a single connected group to being split into two separate pieces, with one member becoming completely isolated from the rest. This happened even though no one had left the team and no new people had joined. The researchers could not say for certain that the change in the academic calendar caused this split, but they noted that it was a strong possibility. What they did know for sure was that the physical distance between campuses remained a powerful force; even as the team fractured, the people on the same campus still stuck together more than chance would predict.

The findings challenge the common belief that a team working on multiple goals will naturally blend those goals into a single, unified way of working. In this case, the dual mandate did not create a blended network. Instead, it created two separate paths. The teaching mission was a team effort that happened inside the group and across the university. The research mission was a specialized effort that happened almost entirely outside the group, carried by a few individuals who reached out to the wider world. The team itself was not the place where research happened; it was the place where teaching happened. The research mandate was met not by the whole team working together, but by a small minority of members who acted as bridges to the outside world.

This pattern suggests that when an organization asks a single team to do two very different things, the team may not be able to do both together. Instead, the work gets divided. Some people focus on the internal work, keeping the team running and the students learning, while others focus on the external work, bringing in new ideas and partnerships. The team stays together not because they are all doing the same research, but because they are in the same place and because they have a manager who keeps the lines of communication open. The study highlights that in a world where remote work is common and teams are spread out, physical location and clear leadership can be more important for holding a group together than the actual tasks they share. It serves as a reminder that just because a group is called a team and has a shared mission, it does not mean they are all interacting in the same way or working toward that mission through the same connections.