I recently became the lead on a new team. My previous team was more pure software development. We pair-programmed ~80% of the time utilizing TDD. 

My new team is in charge of supporting, maintaining, and releasing features for a suite of microservices on Kubernetes. I would estimate we spend < 5% of our time doing TDD/programming but management wants us to pair on almost everything.

Here's my understanding of the purpose of pair programming:

* it decreases the number of bugs in software
* it is most effective when done while following TDD practices

Management has said the following when I brought this up:

* pairing for our team will help spread the knowledge of what we are learning and doing in the project space

Since I'm new both to being a team lead and working in an environment that is not focused on software development I'd like to get feedback on this. Is pairing an effective strategy for non-programming related tasks? Have there been studies around pairing on admin/configuration tasks?