Team Performance training in LucerneCross-training: must everyone learn their colleagues' jobs to coordinate better?

When a team depends on a few specialists, teaching everyone their colleagues' jobs can seem an obvious solution. But do people really need to learn how to replace one another, or mainly understand what others need to do their work?

1. What the literature establishes

Michelle A. Marks, Mark J. Sabella, C. Shawn Burke and Stephen J. Zaccaro (2002, Journal of Applied Psychology) experimentally examine cross-training, which exposes team members to their colleagues' responsibilities. Their findings support its value for developing an understanding of roles and improving coordination. They do not demonstrate that every member needs to master every job in full.

2. Understanding dependencies rather than multiplying substitutes

Michelle A. Marks, John E. Mathieu and Stephen J. Zaccaro (2001, Academy of Management Review) propose a theoretical framework distinguishing coordination, monitoring contributions and backup behaviours, among other processes. This framework helps clarify the expected mechanism: understanding the constraints of an adjacent role helps people adjust the timing and form of their own contribution. It is a conceptual account, not a second experimental demonstration of cross-training effectiveness.

3. The hasty conclusion: make everyone interchangeable

It would be tempting to conclude that a team improves whenever everyone can do everything. Yet understanding a role, practising it and being authorised to perform it are different things. Targeted cross-training can focus solely on critical interfaces: what needs to be passed on, when and in what condition. (our executive and employee training programmes)

4. The limits of the evidence and current practice

Cross-training experiments use simulated tasks; they cannot establish an identical benefit across all occupations. In practice, learning time, qualification requirements and the need to maintain specialist expertise limit how much versatility is desirable. A day of shadowing is therefore neither an authorisation to perform a role nor evidence of improved performance.

5. A practical check in Lucerne

In the canton of Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs provide relevant settings for examining interfaces; in the many family-run businesses with short lines of communication, proximity does not guarantee understanding. As a hypothetical example, a hotel in Lucerne could have reception staff observe housekeeping's handling of a request, then reverse the observation to clarify the information needed at each handover. An exercise within SHR's « Performance d'équipe » programme could follow this approach, comparing the proportion of handovers requiring clarification before and after, across periods with comparable workloads. Recording staffing levels and procedural changes would also help interpret the findings without automatically attributing every change to training. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Team Performance in Lucerne

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