Abstract
Learning by doing is a fundamental driver of productivity among knowledge workers. As workers accumulate experience working on certain types of tasks (i.e., they become specialized), they also develop proficiency in executing these tasks. However, previous research suggests that organizations may struggle to leverage the knowledge workers accrue through specialization because specialized workers tend to lose interest and reduce effort during task execution. This study investigates how organizations can improve specialized workers’ performance by mitigating the dysfunctional effects of specialization. In particular, we study how other sources of task experiences from the worker's immediate manager as well as the organization itself help manage the relationship between worker specialization and performance. We do so by analyzing a proprietary dataset that comprises of 39,162 software service tasks that 310 employees in a Fortune 100 organization executed under the supervision of 92 managers. Results suggest that the manager role experience (i.e., the manager's experience supervising workers) is instrumental in mitigating the potential negative effect of worker specialization on performance, measured as task execution time. Such influence, however, is contingent on cases in which organizational task experience (i.e., the organization's experience in executing tasks of the same substantive content as the focal task) is limited. Taken together, our research contributes to multiple streams of research and unearths important insights on how multiple sources of experience beyond the workers themselves can help capture the elusive benefits of worker specialization.
Highlights
Learning by doing is a fundamental driver of productivity for knowledge workers in settings such as legal process outsourcing, information technology (IT), medical diagnostics, banking, and tax services (Clark et al 2013, Regan and Heenan 2010, Srikanth and Puranam 2011, Staats and Gino 2012)
We investigate the interactions among these types of experience by asking the following question: How do manager role experience and organizational task experience affect the relationship between worker specialization and worker performance?
We empirically investigate the factors beyond individual worker traits that can allow firms to extract the full potential of worker specialization while limiting its costs
Summary
Learning by doing is a fundamental driver of productivity for knowledge workers in settings such as legal process outsourcing, information technology (IT), medical diagnostics, banking, and tax services (Clark et al 2013, Regan and Heenan 2010, Srikanth and Puranam 2011, Staats and Gino 2012) In these settings, workers accrue technical and organizational expertise by repetitively performing similar tasks (Gupta and Govindarajan 1984, KC and Staats 2012, Smith 1766, Vickers et al 2007). Workers accrue technical and organizational expertise by repetitively performing similar tasks (Gupta and Govindarajan 1984, KC and Staats 2012, Smith 1766, Vickers et al 2007) This accumulation of task experience (hereafter referred to as specialization) has been associated with progressive but. Comparable results are found in studies that focus on other types of problem-solving activities, such as cardiothoracic surgery (KC and Staats 2012), computing services (Kim et al 2012), and software services (Boh et al 2007)
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