ABSTRACT
Organizations have been making use of workforce cross-training, also known as job rotation, job flexibility, and worker multifunctionality, for a long time. A number of related concepts have been widely recognized by both researchers and practitioners in a variety of theoretical models and organizational designs. In the context of these systems, in which workers are trained on alternative tasks in addition to their primary tasks, much of the workforce flexibility literature has attempted to address the fundamental question of how much cross-training should be given to each worker, i.e., how many different tasks each worker should master under certain assumptions (e.g., Russell et al., 1991; Bokhorst and Slomp, 2000; Slomp and Molleman, 2000; Cesani and Steudel, 2000a, 2000b). A key difficulty in determining the appropriate number of tasks is the fact that there is significant heterogeneity within many organizations with respect to human performance and capabilities (see, for example, Buzacott, 2002). Specifically, levels of human learning and forgetting play an important role in shaping productivity outcomes (Shafer et al., 2001).
