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L earning 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.

Research has found that a project manager's experience is a driver of project performance. However, whether specialist or generalist project managers are more effective remains an open question to date. In this paper, we examine how project managers' breadth of experience influences project completion time under different levels of project complexity. Using longitudinal data from 9,765 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system projects executed by a software services organization, we find that managers' breadth of experience has a U-shaped impact on project completion time. We also find that while we can identify an optimal level of breadth of experience that minimizes project completion time on the U-curve, this optimal level becomes lower (the U-curve shifts to the left) as project complexity increases. As project complexity decreases, the U-curve flattens and tends to become monotonically decreasing, signifying that diseconomies from project managers' breadth of experience are less apparent in simpler projects. From a practical standpoint, these findings suggest that project managers' breadth of experience is a critical driver of project performance that should be a key consideration in the selection of managers to lead knowledge work, especially for complex projects.

Global firms often attempt to utilize modular product architectures to ease the distribution of project work among subsidiaries. However, empirical findings on the effectiveness of this approach are mixed. Seeking to clarify this matter, we investigate the conditions under which modular product platform use is associated with cross‐subsidiary distribution of project work. Through an in‐depth case study of a global corporation, we find that a firm’s ability to leverage modular product platforms for distributing project work is positively associated with project interface match (i.e., the extent to which meeting the requirements of a derivative project does not entail modifications of the interfaces embedded in the firm’s modular product platforms). However, this association is attenuated, and eventually muted, by the project technical manager’s related technical experience (i.e., the manager’s personal experience with the technical solution addressing a focal project’s customer requirements). Such attenuation effect originates because lower levels of project interface match do not necessarily imply greater expected project coordination effort. Such expectation is reduced to the extent that the technical project manager has related technical experience. Triangulation of qualitative insights from four embedded cases with a proprietary database of 97 projects supports our contention. These findings contribute to the literatures on product and organizational modularity, distributed work, and project management.

This chapter presents a global overview of green logistics practices at various management levels and the inherent challenges of their implementation in emerging markets. It begins by clarifying the terminology and describing its scope and characteristics, and it continues with an analysis of the impact of green logistics on the creation of economic and social value.

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