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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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• Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2016 (Revised September 2020)

  T-Mobile in 2013: The Un-Carrier

  John Beshears, Francesca Gino, Jonathan Lee and Sean (Yixiang) Wang

  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.

  Keywords: Business Model; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Product Positioning; Competition; Wireless Technology; Telecommunications Industry; United States;

  Citation:

  Beshears, John, Francesca Gino, Jonathan Lee, and Sean (Yixiang) Wang. "T-Mobile in 2013: The Un-Carrier." Harvard Business School Case 916-043, February 2016. (Revised September 2020.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2020

  &pizza: Leading an ‘Employee-First’ Company During a Period of Societal Challenges

  Francesca Gino and Jeffrey Huizinga

  &Pizza is a pizza chain that in the spring of 2020 finds its business completely up-ended by the COVID-19 crisis and shut-down. Many companies in the restaurant and hospitality sector responded to the crisis by shutting down their operations and laying off employees. &Pizza’s leader took a different approach: as the company pivoted mainly to a delivery model, he realized there would be added strain on his employees, and so he decided to not only avoid lay-offs, but to increase wages and provide other benefits to its Tribe (i.e., the employees).

  Keywords: Agility; crisis; culture; values; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management; Leadership; Organizational Culture; Values and Beliefs;

  Citation:

  Gino, Francesca, and Jeffrey Huizinga. "&pizza: Leading an ‘Employee-First’ Company During a Period of Societal Challenges." Harvard Business School Case 921-017, September 2020.  View Details

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