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• Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2020 (Revised November 2020)

  Culture Transformation at Microsoft: From ‘Know it All’ to ‘Learn it All’

  Francesca Gino, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga

  Citation:

  Gino, Francesca, Allison Ciechanover, and Jeff Huizinga. "Culture Transformation at Microsoft: From ‘Know it All’ to ‘Learn it All’." Harvard Business School Case 921-004, September 2020. (Revised November 2020.)  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  'Repayment-by-Purchase' Helps Consumers to Reduce Credit Card Debt

  Grant E. Donnelly, Cait Lamberton, Stephen Bush, Zoe Chance and Michael I. Norton

  Many consumers struggle to repay their credit card debt, in part because paying small portions of large bills often feels fruitless. We introduce a novel credit card payment option—repayment-by-purchase—and examine its influence on both the amount consumers’ repay and their perception of progress toward reducing their debt. With typical repayment, consumers simply enter the amount they wish to pay toward their total balance—often the minimum required payment. With repayment-by-purchase, in contrast, consumers can select specific purchases (e.g., a coffee at Starbucks, a utility bill) that they wish to repay, and make payments specifically directed toward “eliminating” these purchases. Five studies reveal that repayment-by-purchase increases awareness of what is being repaid, which increases perceptions of progress toward reducing debt, which in turn encourages higher repayment. In a large field experiment, credit card customers who were given the opportunity to allocate their payment toward specific purchase categories paid 12.18% more toward their debt balance than a control group. These findings advance our practical understanding of how consumers can be encouraged to pay more toward credit card debt and offer conceptual insight into how both increased awareness and perceived goal progress enhance consumer motivation to get out of debt.

  Citation:

  Donnelly, Grant E., Cait Lamberton, Stephen Bush, Zoe Chance, and Michael I. Norton. "'Repayment-by-Purchase' Helps Consumers to Reduce Credit Card Debt." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-060, November 2020.  View Details

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• Article | Management Science | October 2020

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

  Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino

  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 decrease 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 preference (TCP). Using six years of data from a hospital emergency department, we find that physicians engage in TCP, with implications for their performance. Specifically, TCP helps physicians manage variance in service times; however, while it initially appears to improve shift-level throughput volume, after adjusting for the complexity of the work completed, TCP is related to worse throughput. Moreover, we find that engaging in easier tasks, as compared to hard ones, is related to lower learning in service times. We then turn to the lab to replicate conceptually the short-term task selection effect under increased workload and show that it occurs due to both fatigue and the sense of progress individuals get from task completion. These findings provide another 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.

  Keywords: healthcare; knowledge work; discretion; Workload; Employees; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Productivity;

  Citation:

  KC, Diwas S., Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino. "Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance." Management Science 66, no. 10 (October 2020).  View Details

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