When You Work with a Super Man, Will You Also Fly? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Coworkers on Performance

Tan, Tom Fangyun; Netessine, Serguei

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2688097

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 65 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Second, our paper joins the growing literature in operations that uses detailed micro-level production and service data to study how environmental, social, and psychological factors can impact individual worker productivity. Recent studies have demonstrated operational policies such as scheduling and staffing (Chan et al 2014;Dai et al 2015;Huckman and Staats 2011), monitoring and transparency (Bernstein 2012;Buell et al 2016;Staats et al 2016;Tan and Netessine 2015), performance recognition (Gubler et al 2016;Song et al 2016), and workflow (Kuntz et al 2014;Staats and Gino 2012;Tan and Netessine 2014) can all profoundly impact worker performance. Even environmental factors outside managerial control, such as weather (Lee et al 2014), are being revealed as determinants of individual and group productivity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing Well by Making Well: The Impact of Corporate Wellness Programs on Employee Productivity

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper provides the first evidence linking a panel of individual medical data from a corporate wellness program with objective productivity improvements in industrial workers. Almost 90% of companies use corporate wellness programs designed to improve employee health. Existing research has focused on measuring cost savings from reduced insurance rates and absenteeism. In contrast, our paper explains and empirically tests how wellness programs can improve employee productivity, and thereby firm performance. We argue that productivity improvement can arise from two sources. First, wellness programs can increase job motivation through improved satisfaction for all workers and gratitude or reciprocity from those who discover a previously-undiagnosed illness. Second, wellness programs increase employee capability by spurring them to take actions that improve health, well-being and ultimately productivity. We test these predictions using a wellness program implemented at multiple plants of an industrial laundry company. Using a three-year panel of individual productivity and medical data, we find program participation increased productivity by 5%, compared to non-participants, regardless of pre-existing health levels or post-program health changes, suggesting increased job satisfaction for participants. Moreover, many sick and healthy individuals improved their health, increasing productivity by 11%. Surveys indicate that many employees, regardless of pre-existing health levels, improved their diet and exercise from the program. Overall this study suggests that firms can increase operational productivity through socially responsible firm health policies that improve both workers' wellness and economic value.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing Well by Making Well: The Impact of Corporate Wellness Programs on Employee Productivity

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Hence peer performance is unlikely to affect primary worker productivity. Prior work examining peer effects notes that observability is a key driver of productivity (Bandiera, Barankay, & Rasul, 2010;Mas & Moretti, 2009;Tan & Netessine, 2015), and workers, in general, given our field setting, cannot easily observe other harvesters. Second, workers are unlikely to discuss their performance after the shift.…”

Section: Base Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Various aspects of work structure-including task design, specialization, interdependence, work scheduling and sequencing-have been found to impact important outcomes, such as productivity and quality (Kc & Terwiesch, 2009;Narayanan, Balasubramanian, & Swaminathan, 2009;Song, Tucker, & Murrell, 2015;Staats & Gino, 2012). The scheduling of labor has proven to be a significant consideration for ensuring prolonged successful performance: who works, with whom they work, and when they work are important structural factors that can lead to positive performance outcomes (Huckman, Staats, & Upton, 2009;Kesavan, Staats, & Gilland, 2014;Song & Tucker, 2016;Tan & Netessine, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Microstructure of Work: How Unexpected Breaks Let You Rest, But Not Lose Focus

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How best to structure the work day is an important operational question for organizations. A key structural consideration is the effective use of breaks from work. Breaks serve the critical purpose of allowing employees to recharge, but in the short term, translate to a loss of time that usually leads to reduced productivity. We evaluate the effects of two types of breaks (expected versus unexpected), and two distinct forms of unexpected breaks, and find that unexpected breaks can, under certain conditions, yield immediate post-break performance increases. We test our hypotheses using productivity data from 212 fruit harvesters collected over one harvesting season yielding nearly 250,000 truckloads of fruit harvested over the course of 9,832 shifts. We provide a conceptual laboratory replication of these findings, showing that unexpected breaks lead to increased performance when they allow people to maintain attention on the focal task. Our results suggest that the characteristics of a break can lead the break to be experienced as an interruption, with all consequent negative outcomes, or as a rejuvenating and experience, with positive post-break consequences.

show abstract

“…Our casual dining data provide a valuable empirical setting to study whether and how a router deviates from a rule that he/she is instructed to follow and to evaluate such discretionary deviation. First, waiters are a heterogeneous group, with varying sales and speed skills (Tan and Netessine ). These variations allow us to understand how server‐related factors may contribute to a router’s discretionary assignment preferences.…”

Section: Empirical Setting Data and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral Drivers of Routing Decisions: Evidence from Restaurant Table Assignment

Tan

Staats

2020

Production and Operations Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

W e first theoretically identify the factors that may impact individuals' routing decisions before empirically examining a large operational dataset in a casual restaurant setting. Analytical models have identified various routing algorithms for service operations management. Although each model may offer advantages over others, they all make a key assumption -decision makers will actually follow the algorithms, if implemented. However, in many settings routing is not done by a computer that is programmed, but instead by a human. People make routing decisions at their own discretion which may hurt or help system performance. We analyze granular transaction data to examine how hosts revise a given routing rule when seating customers. Thereafter, we empirically analyze the effect of the dispersion of table assignments on restaurant performance, and estimate the counterfactual sales impact of adopting an alternative routing priority. Our setting instructs its hosts to follow a round-robin rule to assign tasks because it ensures fairness and smooths work flow. We find that hosts assign more incoming parties than the round-robin rule suggests to those waiters who have low contemporaneous workload or high speed skills. The prioritization of high speed skill waiters increases with higher levels of demand. In addition, we show an inverted-U-shaped relationship between the inequality of table assignments (measured in terms of the Gini Coefficient of the numbers of tables assigned to each waiter during the same hour) and total sales. Our results suggest that properly adjusting the round-robin rule is productive; however, too much deviation lowers performance. Our paper empirically highlights the value of routing decisions and front-line personnel, such as the hosts in our context.

show abstract

When You Work with a Super Man, Will You Also Fly? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Coworkers on Performance

Cited by 5 publications

References 65 publications

Doing Well by Making Well: The Impact of Corporate Wellness Programs on Employee Productivity

Doing Well by Making Well: The Impact of Corporate Wellness Programs on Employee Productivity

The Microstructure of Work: How Unexpected Breaks Let You Rest, But Not Lose Focus

Behavioral Drivers of Routing Decisions: Evidence from Restaurant Table Assignment

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About