Prioritising: assign the task to whoever is available or whoever has experience?
When several cases are waiting, assigning the next one to the first available person seems a reasonable way to save time. The managerial question is more precise: should immediate availability or familiarity with the work take precedence, and what evidence should inform that choice?
What the literature establishes
Diane Liang, Richard Moreland and Linda Argote (1995, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) compared groups whose members had trained together or separately on an assembly task. Groups trained together performed better; their analyses attributed part of this advantage to transactive memory, meaning a shared understanding of who knows what. When allocating work, individual competence is therefore not the only relevant resource: knowing where it resides within the team also matters.
The mechanism: knowing where expertise resides
Kyle Lewis (2003, Journal of Applied Psychology) developed and field-validated a measure of transactive memory systems that distinguishes specialisation, credibility and coordination. Knowing a colleague’s specialism is not enough: team members must also be able to trust that expertise and organise their work accordingly. This framework suggests that an apparently quick assignment may shift time into seeking explanations or reworking the task later.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that teams should always wait for the most experienced person. Yet these studies do not directly compare an availability-based allocation rule with an expertise-based rule. Concentrating cases on the same specialists can create a queue and prevent others from becoming independent. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
An experimental assembly task and a field validation of a measurement instrument provide no universal threshold at which waiting for a specialist becomes worthwhile. In practice, the delay before work starts is readily visible, while time spent explaining and correcting is often spread across several people. Comparing start dates alone may therefore favour availability without reducing the total time committed.
A practical check in Fribourg
As part of SHR’s time management and prioritisation programme, an exercise could track one category of recurring cases in an agri-food business, a bilingual industrial team or a service within Fribourg’s university hub. For each case, record the reason for allocation — availability or expertise —, the elapsed time to closure and the combined time spent processing, explaining and correcting by everyone involved. Then compare cases of similar complexity and working language, also recording those still waiting: this local observation would not establish causality, but it would help check whether starting sooner actually saves collective working time. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Fribourg
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