Skill development, bargaining power, and a theory of job design

Abstract

We examine the job design decision in the context of skill development and bargaining power. The choice between specialization and multitasking requires employees to develop either specialized or varied task-specific skills. Employees' (i.e., the owners of the acquired skills) bargaining power depends on their skill sets, which differentiate their ability to hold up production and threaten to leave a firm. When a firm cannot meaningfully elicit skill investments through job design, it will pursue inefficient multitasking to reduce production holdups or inefficient specialization to prevent skilled employees from leaving. We obtain inefficient job design results only for mediocre ability workers.

A Critique on Task Allocation Processes in Distributed Agile Software Development

“…Many objectives are defined in proposed researches, for example, minimizing the development effort [79], minimizing defects [78,80], minimizing cost [1,4,8,13,14,16,18,19,25,33,36,76,[81][82][83][84][85], minimizing time [8,13,14,18,19,33,36,37,55,78,81,83,85], increasing quality [8,13,14,18,19,24,33,36,55,56,76], timelines of completion of tasks [57], increasing team members' productivity [42,43], improving work relationship and maximizing project's requirements [83], on-time completion, on- budget completion, functionality completion, and satisfying required quality…”

“…Development tasks are identified in proposed research such as [4,13,19,20,23,25,36,55,57,58,65,78,79,81,84,85].…”

“…(4) Task Related Factors. Task size [6,30], task type [6, 19, 22-25, 65, 84, 92], task complexity [6, 14, 20, 22-25, 55, 58, 65, 79], required budget [14], task environment complexity [73], proximity to customer requirement [6,34], required skills [4,6,13,14,23,24,24,30,34,34,35,44,65,81,84], required resources [6,34], task deadline [6,34], task priority [6], task novelty [9], task familiarity [65], task analyzability [9], and task variability [9] are task related factors.…”