A Matter of Balance: Specialization, Task Variety, and Individual Learning in a Software Maintenance Environment

Abstract

Specialization at work has been recognized as a key driver of learning and productivity since the days of Adam Smith. More recently, researchers have noted that exposure to task variety can enhance learning. We examine how exposure to specialization and variety jointly drive employee productivity in a real-life setting. We analyze a data set covering 88 individuals who worked on 5,711 maintenance tasks in an offshore software support services operation. We find that, as expected, specialization enhances productivity. However, exposure to variety has a nonlinear influence on productivity; i.e., "too much variety" can impede learning. We also find that achieving a proper balance between specialization and exposure to a variety leads to the highest productivity. We capture this balance using an adaptation of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index from the economics literature. In addition, we examine how the productivity of individuals in a workgroup is affected by member entry and exit, with the latter specified in terms of the degree of specialized experience and the degree of variety experience lost from the workgroup when a member exits. Our analysis reveals that the degree of variety experience lost has a greater impact on productivity than the degree of specialized experience that is lost.project management, organizational studies, productivity, effectiveness-performance, information systems, IT policy and management, outsourcing, learning and productivity

Accumulating a Portfolio of Experience: The Effect of Focal and Related Experience on Surgeon Performance

“…Examples include software modules (Boh et al 2007;Narayanan et al 2009), computer games (Schilling et al 2003), and data entry stages (Staats and Gino 2011). However, outside of the realm of either very simple tasks or experiments run in the laboratory under tight control conditions, a real-world task consists of many sub-tasks.…”

“…In our analysis, we draw on prior literature (Narayanan et al 2009) and quantify the task variety using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), which is defined as follows:…”

“…Work in operations management has examined experience accumulation by separating task experience into two components: focal 1 and related experience (i.e., tasks similar to, but not identical to, the focal task, Boh, Slaughter and Espinosa 2007;Narayanan, Balasubramanian and Swaminathan 2009;Staats and Gino 2011). As a first step, we investigate this division of individual task experience in health care (Huckman and Zinner 2008;Ramdas et al 2010;KC and Terwiesch 2011).…”

Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank

“…Prior work that examines the individual-level productivity effects of specialization and variety across many days has examined only the possible direct effects of variety (Boh et al 2007;Narayanan et al 2009), and has not considered any complementarities that variety may offer over time (Lindbeck and Snower 2000). Here we are interested in whether the returns to prior day specialization are increasing in the prior day amount of varied experience.…”

“…Voluntary employee turnover is a costly proposition as exiting workers depart with valuable and difficult to transfer production knowledge (Darr, Argote and Epple 1995;Narayanan et al 2009) and it is necessary to recruit and train new employees, whose initial productivity is typically low (Staw 1980;Ton and Huckman 2008). Task assignment may not only affect task-level productivity, but it may also impact worker turnover as task variety could lead to increased job engagement (Herzberg 1968;Hackman and Oldham 1976), lower levels of boredom (Warr 2007), and increased job satisfaction (Ichniowski and Shaw 1999;Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner 2000).…”