Job Rotation as a Learning Mechanism

By Jaime Ortega. Management Sciences, 2001

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article analyzes the costs and benefits of job rotation as a mechanism with which the firm can learn about the employees' productivities and the profitability of different jobs or activities. I compare job rotation to an assignment policy where employees specialize in one job along their career. The gains from adopting a job rotation policy are larger when there is more prior uncertainty about employees and activities. I argue that this firm learning theory fits the existing evidence on rotation better than alternative explanations based on employee motivation and employee learning.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/052b94c71ca0acadf6d8a125ff8f93eb606b4f56

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Michael Waldman
2. Thilo Haamann
3. Greg R. Oldham
4. Dirk Basten
5. Nora Y. Madjar

In Management of Technology and Innovation

1. Michael Waldman
2. Thilo Haamann
3. Greg R. Oldham
4. Dirk Basten
5. Nora Y. Madjar

Citations in the corpus

• Approaches for Organizational Learning: A Literature Review (2018, background): “Bennett (2003); Campion, Cheraskin, and Stevens (1994); Fægri, Dybå, and Dingsøyr (2010); Kolb (1984); Louis (1980); Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995); Ortega (2001); Ostroff and Kozlowski (1992); Prusak (1997); Taylor and Greve (2006) Knowledge broker This role creates connections between knowledge…”
• Theory and evidence in internal labor markets (2007, methodology): “Ortega (2001) provides a new explanation for job rotation.”
• Monkey bars and ladders: The importance of lateral and vertical job mobility in internal labor market careers (2003, unknown): “be used to screen workers or learn about their optimal assignment (Ortega, 2001), in which case lateral transitions do not entail a priori information on career perspectives.”
• Task Rotation and Polychronicity: Effects on Individuals' Creativity (2006, background): “However, employees in many contemporary organizations are no longer assigned single tasks, but instead are asked to complete multiple tasks and to rotate through these tasks on a regular basis (see Gittleman, Horrigan, & Joice, 1998; Lawler, 2000; Malinski, 2002; Ortega, 2001; Osterman, 1994, 2000).”