1. Bagby Copy Company is faced between choosing specialized task assignment and broad task assignment.
Benefits of Specialized Task Assignment:
Exploiting Comparative Advantage: Specialized task assignment allows Bagby to match people with jobs based on skills and training and correspondingly has employees concentrate on their particular specialties.
Lower Cross-Training Expenses: With specialized task assignment, each employee is trained to complete one basic function.
Costs of Specialized Task Assignment:
Forgone Complementarities across Tasks: Sometimes, performing one task can lower the cost of having the same person performing another task.
Coordination Costs: The activities of specialized employees have to be coordinated.
Functional Myopia: With specialized task assignment, employees tend to concentrate on their individual functions rather than on the overall process of providing good sales and service to customers.
Reduced Flexibility: Utilizing specialized task assignment may mean the company may need to employ new staff, depending on the production technology and productivity rate. This is because employees of Bagby will be limited, trained and constrained to perform one specific task only. They are not expected to be flexible and can perform other tasks.
Benefits of Broad Task Assignment: By using the broad task assignment, Bagby will not hire additional staff as employees can be rotated to perform specific tasks depending on the rate of productivity and production technology.
Costs of Broad Task Assignment: One downside of broad task assignment is the cost of cross-training and seminars. As every employee is expected to be competent in different tasks, Bagby has to provide training and seminars to its employees. Such trainings and seminars might be costly. Furthermore, while the firm may have employees who are able to perform different tasks,