Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance

Abstract

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can increase their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly. As the number of tasks increases, however, workers may also manage their workload by a different process -task selection. Drawing on research on workload, individual discretion, and behavioral decision making we theorize and then test that under conditions of increased workload individuals may choose to complete easier tasks in order to manage their load. We label this behavior Task Completion Bias (TCB). Using two years of data from a hospital emergency department we find support for TCB and also show that it improves shortterm productivity. However, although it improves performance in the short-term we find that an overreliance on this task selection strategy hurts performance -as measured both by speed and revenue -in the long run. We then turn to the lab to replicate conceptually the task selection effect and show that it occurs due to the positive feelings individuals get from task completion. These findings provide an alternative mechanism for the workload-speedup effect from the literature. We also discuss implications for both research and the practice of operations in building systems to help people succeed in both the short and long run.

Confidence as a Priority Signal

“…Finally, although we did not find a clear consequence from the easy-first bias on performance, we note that one previous study on physicians has associated this strategy with both short-term benefits (treating more patients per unit of time) and long-term costs (across individuals, it predicted lower productivity and thus less revenue for the hospital; KC et al, 2017). Understanding whether similar short-term benefits and long-term costs may arise in other contexts (e.g., those involving multiple perceptuomotor tasks) is an exciting topic for future research.…”

“…For instance, students appear to prioritize easier course assignments (Puffer, 1989) or Web-search tasks (Spink et al, 2006) over difficult ones. Physicians at an emergency department prioritize easy patient cases, especially when under heavy workloads (KC, Staats, Kouchaki, & Gino, 2017). Our study makes several unique contributions to this research topic: We extended this result to situations involving immediate decisions, we linked the easy-first bias to confidence, and we offered strict control over performance in the task via our psychophysical procedures.…”

Recovering from Critical Incidents: Evidence from Paramedic Performance

“…They find that this task ordering erodes productivity but that with increased doctor experience some of the negative productivity impact is mitigated. In addition, KC et al (2017) find that workers who select their next task from a common queue, tend to choose easier tasks first (task completion bias) during periods of high workload. This lightens workload in the short-term but hurts long-term performance.…”

Nudging Charitable Giving: What (If Anything) Is Wrong With It?

“…Bovens (2018, p. 172) refers to Kiva, a nonprofit organization that relies on crowdfunding to offering microloans to people in developing countries (see also: Moleskis et al, 2019). Highlighting the loans close to their targets and suggesting that loans are provided only when that target is reached, Kiva’s website design taps into people’s “task completion bias”: the tendency to prioritize tasks that can easily be completed (KC et al, 2017).…”