What is it about?
Most white collared knowledge employees engage in multiple tasks in the workplace on a day to day basis. This is the first paper to study the role of task experience (depth and breath) on learning and overall productivity in such operations. The paper utilizes a large dataset about software professionals to draw conclusions.
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Why is it important?
In this work we show that depth and breadth of worker experience improves learning and productivity. In particular, we introduce Herfindahl-Hirschman index (an economics measure) for the first time in the context of workforce experience and show it to be a significant driver. We find that too much task variety can impede learning. A proper balance between specialization and breadth leads to the highest productivity. Our analysis also reveals that the degree of variety experience lost (during an employee turnover) has a greater impact on productivity than the degree of specialized experience that is lost.
Perspectives
This is one of the first papers that studies role of task variety on work productivity in the knowledge sector. Subsequent studies in many other knowledge industries such as banking, hospitals have found that similar effects prevail. It was great working with my co-authors Sriram Narayanan (doctoral student at that time) and Sridhar Balasubramanian (a colleague in Marketing at that time).
JAYASHANKAR Swaminathan
American Diplomacy Publishers
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Matter of Balance: Specialization, Task Variety, and Individual Learning in a Software Maintenance Environment, Management Science, November 2009, INFORMS,
DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1090.1057.
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