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  • 2017
  • Working Paper
  • HBS Working Paper Series

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

By: Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
  • | Pages:36
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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, 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 workload. 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 short-term 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.

Keywords

Employees; 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." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 17-112, June 2017.
  • SSRN
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About The Author

Francesca Gino

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
→More Publications

Related Work

    • October 2020
    • Management Science

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

    By: Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
Related Work
  • Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance By: Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
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