Striking Out Swinging: Specialist Success Following Forced Task Inferiority

Abstract

Organizing work around specialized professionals leverages their deep expertise and mastery of particular skills. However, as work becomes more flexible, organizations often require specialists to perform some work outside their specialization. These tasks, which distance specialists from the area of their greatest contribution, could diminish their performance by being distracting or tiring or by creating negative comparisons with others who are more proficient in that work. Contrary to these perspectives, we find robust evidence that specialists’ performance can be enhanced, rather than diminished, after work outside their specialization. Using archival data from 22 years of Major League Baseball (MLB) games and interviews with former MLB players and coaches, we find that specialized players perform better in their specialty after obligatory tasks outside of their specialization. We argue that this occurs through a process we call forced task inferiority, in which underperformance in tasks outside their specialty frustrates specialists, generating heightened arousal and drive that they can channel into better performance in their specialty work. The results are robust to alternative mechanisms, such as tasks outside a specialist’s area of specialization leading to learning, breaking monotony, or threatening the specialist’s professional identity. This research advances knowledge about managing specialists and flexible work arrangements by showing that when tasks are particularly sequenced, specialists’ performance can be enhanced, rather than diminished, by doing work outside their specialty. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1680 .