Kamini Gupta (King's Business School) – "The role of knowledge specialists in multiple goal pursuit: A field experiment"

The Strategy, International Management & Group of King's Business School organises bi-weekly research seminars with current and visiting academics.

This week we welcome Dr Kamini Gupta (King's Business School). 

"The role of knowledge specialists in multiple goal pursuit: A field experiment."

Abstract:

What enables organizations to pursue multiple goals simultaneously? Scholars agree that structural separation, such that different work units specialize in tasks related to only one goal at a time, is integral to answering this question. However, in some cases the same task affects multiple goals simultaneously such that specializing in tasks related to only one goal is impossible or undesirable. For such cases, I explored whether an organization structure that provides access to knowledge specialists each of whom focuses on only one goal can improve work unit performance. To do this, I conducted a field experiment across 25 locations of a social enterprise in India, where I randomly assigned different types of ‘knowledge specialists’ to 101 work units. The key manipulation in this experiment was the job design of work-unit members where tasks related to generation and evaluation of ideas for performance improvement were divided based on the type of knowledge held by the worker. The results of this field experiment along with extensive qualitative work after the experiment show that specialists can indeed be useful in increasing work unit performance but that their effectiveness partly depends on the nature of goals.'