Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams

Akşin, O. Zeynep; Deo, Sarang; Jónasson, Jónas Oddur; Ramdas, Kamalini

doi:10.1287/mnsc.2019.3576

Cited by 44 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Building on this work, it has been found that some of the performance improvements due to individual experience are only realized at the particular organization (Huckman and Pisano 2006), for the particular task (KC and Staats 2012), or for the particular customer (Clark et al 2013), with which the experience was acquired. Similarly, studies have found that diversity in prior tasks (Boh et al 2007), customers (Clark et al 2013, Huckman andStaats 2011), and partners (Akşin et al 2018, Kim et al 2018 can impact performance.…”

Section: Drivers Of Worker Performance In Operational Systemsmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…This is the most divergent and unpredictable sub-process of the activation, in the sense that the process steps themselves are unpredictable. Ambulance crews encounter a host of clinical and non-clinical issues which the crew must resolve together, usually under challenging circumstances and without any external support (Akşin et al 2018, Shostack 1987. As a result the crew cannot follow a standard operating procedure at the scene, but must rely on their decision-making abilities in choosing the best course of action for each incident.…”

Section: Ambulance Activationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our setting of ambulance operations is an ideal setting to examine whether this is the case since it is well documented that paramedics are exposed to acutely stressful situations on a regular basis, which often has long-term consequences for psychological and emotional health (LeBlanc et al 2011). In addition, they are presented with these unpredictable and challenging situations with little or no advance notice (Akşin et al 2018). This unpredictability prevents psychological or behavioral preparation for the CI, which could otherwise mitigate the effects of acutely stressful events (Inzana et al 1996).…”

Section: Impact On Subsequent Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Recovering from Critical Incidents: Evidence from Paramedic Performance

Bavafa

Jónasson²

2021

M&SOM

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In service operations settings where the difficulty of jobs is unpredictable, workers can encounter critical incidents (CIs)-jobs which are sufficiently disturbing to challenge workers' coping mechanisms. We examine the impact of encountering CIs on subsequent operational performance of workers.Academic / Practical Relevance: Prior work has examined the effects of CIs on the long-term psychological health of workers. We demonstrate that encountering CIs has a practically meaningful impact on operational performance. We also examine the time-dependency and process-dependency of the effect, and analyze whether it is mitigated by individual characteristics such as age or experience.Methodology: We use data on 902,002 ambulance activations conducted by paramedics at the London Ambulance Service (LAS). We define CIs as incidents where patients have a high probability of dying at the scene, and examine the impact of such events on the paramedics' performance for the remainder of their shifts. Our outcomes are the completion time of the ambulance activation and each of its five sub-processes.The exogenous assignment of CIs to paramedic crews allows a clean identification of our effect using a shift-level difference-in-differences specification.Results: Crews who have encountered one prior CI (two prior CIs) spend on average 2.6% (7.5%) more time completing each remaining ambulance activation in the shift. The impact is strongest for the jobs immediately following a CI but persists throughout the shift. The largest effects come from the sub-processes which are least standardized and where paramedics cannot rely on standard operating procedures. The duration effect is larger for teams of older paramedics, but is simultaneously mitigated by experience.Managerial Implications: Our results show that CIs increase subsequent job duration and that more than one CIs have a compounding, negative effect on operational performance. As a result, managers in settings where performance consistency is key would be advised not to assign new jobs to teams with recent CI experiences.

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Section: Drivers Of Worker Performance In Operational Systemsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Ambulance Activationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Impact On Subsequent Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Recovering from Critical Incidents: Evidence from Paramedic Performance

Bavafa

Jónasson²

2021

M&SOM

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“…These two-person crews are not fixed, i.e., crew partners are not permanent. Instead they reflect a “fluid team” in which a crew consists of two flight nurses working together temporarily (generally for the duration of a single shift) to accomplish their work before handing off to the next crew at the end of the shift (similar to emergency medical crews; see Akşin et al, 2021). On a given shift, a flight nurse thus sees and interacts not only with their partner on that particular crew but also the outgoing and incoming crews at the same base (i.e., at shift changes occurring at the beginning and end of the shift, respectively), as well as potentially interacting with the crew working at the other base during the same shift hours (either by phone or in person).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Storytelling as a Tool for Vicarious Learning among Air Medical Transport Crews

Myers

2021

Administrative Science Quarterly

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Learning vicariously from the experiences of others at work, such as those working on different teams or projects, has long been recognized as a driver of collective performance in organizations. Yet as work becomes more ambiguous and less observable in knowledge-intensive organizations, previously identified vicarious learning strategies, including direct observation and formal knowledge transfer, become less feasible. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with flight nurse crews in an air medical transport program, I inductively build a model of how storytelling can serve as a valuable tool for vicarious learning. I explore a multistage process of triggering, telling, and transforming stories as a means by which flight nurses convert the raw experience of other crews’ patient transports into prospective knowledge and expanded repertoires of responses for potential future challenges. Further, I highlight how this storytelling process is situated within the transport program’s broader structures and practices, which serve to enable flight nurses’ storytelling and to scale the lessons of their stories throughout the entire program. I discuss the implications of these insights for the study of storytelling as a learning tool in organizations, as well as for revamping the field’s understanding of vicarious learning in knowledge-intensive work settings.

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“…The literature on team experience (sometimes team familiarity) has similarly established that the cumulative number of times a team has jointly completed a task does impact performance (Reagans et al 2005, Huckman et al 2009, Akşin et al 2020). In addition, Staats (2012) finds that the impact of team experience on performance can depend on whether the joint experience is acquired in the same geographic location and whether roles have been changed on the team.…”

Section: Literature Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Variance Learning Curve

Bavafa

Jónasson²

2021

Management Science

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The expansive learning curve literature in operations management has established how various facets of prior experience improve average performance. In this paper, we explore how increased cumulative experience affects performance variability or consistency. We use a two-stage estimation method of a heteroskedastic learning curve model to examine the relationship between experience and performance variability among paramedics at the London Ambulance Service. We find that, for paramedics with lower experience, an increase in experience of 500 jobs reduces the variance of task completion time by 8.7%, in addition to improving average completion times by 2.7%. Similar to prior results on the average learning curve, we find a diminishing impact of additional experience on the variance learning curve. We provide an evidence base for how to model the learning benefits of cumulative experience on performance in service systems. Our findings imply that the benefits of learning are substantially underestimated if the consistency effect is ignored. Specifically, our estimates indicate that queue lengths (or wait times) might be overestimated by as much as 4% by ignoring the impact of the variance learning curve in service systems. Furthermore, our results suggest that previously established drivers of productivity should be revisited to examine how they affect consistency, in addition to average performance. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.

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Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams

Cited by 44 publications

References 55 publications

Recovering from Critical Incidents: Evidence from Paramedic Performance

Recovering from Critical Incidents: Evidence from Paramedic Performance

Storytelling as a Tool for Vicarious Learning among Air Medical Transport Crews

The Variance Learning Curve

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