T-Mobile in 2013: The Un-Carrier

John  Beshears; Francesca  Gino

Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | March 2016

T-Mobile in 2013: The Un-Carrier

Abstract

By 2013, the U.S. wireless industry was in the midst of a costly transition. As consumers began to embrace more sophisticated mobile devices, the industry's four main players spent heavily to improve their infrastructures for providing reliable high-speed data services. T-Mobile, the smallest of the four major carriers, lacked the scale of its competitors and risked falling further behind in the contest for market share. Faced with this daunting business environment, T-Mobile's new CEO declared war on the rest of the industry, decrying competitor pricing practices and upending the traditional contract-based business model. This case provides background information on the state of the wireless industry in 2013 and follows T-Mobile's early steps to transform its market position. In the course of the class discussion, students discover that more intense competition among firms in this market may drive wireless carriers to offer more complex contracts with more add-on fees. However, students also see that it is possible for a company to break out of this competitive dynamic without sacrificing market share.

Keywords: wireless industry; telecommunications; mobile; service contracts; competitive strategy; Behavioral economics; add-on fees; Shrouded Attributes; Contracts; Competitive Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Infrastructure; Mobile Technology; Wireless Technology; Telecommunications Industry; United States;

Language: English

Format: Print

15 pages

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Citation:

Beshears, John, and Francesca Gino. "T-Mobile in 2013: The Un-Carrier." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 916-048, March 2016.

This case tells the story of Spiber, a Japanese technology start-up company. To reflect the company’s values, the leadership team implemented a new and unique salary-setting process: each employee had the authority to choose their own salary. In the course of discussing the case, students are asked to contemplate the challenges that managers face when incentivizing innovation and are invited to brainstorm methods for motivating the behaviors that drive innovation. Students consider the merits of Spiber’s new compensation system and reflect on issues of pay equity. The case allows for a rich discussion regarding the design of effective and fair compensation systems, with a special emphasis on exploring how organizational culture and the broader social and cultural context in which an organization is embedded shape employees’ responses to compensation systems.

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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