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- 2023
- Working Paper
Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality
By: Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, Ethan Mollick, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Katherine C. Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani
The public release of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked tremendous interest in how humans will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accomplish a variety of tasks. In our study conducted with Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm, we examine...
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- 2022
- Article
How Does Working from Home during COVID-19 Affect What Managers Do? Evidence from Time-Use Studies
By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Raffaella Sadun, Andrew L. Kun and Orit Shaer
We assess how the sudden and widespread shift to working from home during the pandemic impacted how managers allocate time throughout their working day. We analyze the results from an online time-use survey with data on 1,192 knowledge workers (out of which 973 are...
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Keywords:
Time-use;
Working-from-home;
COVID;
Managers;
Knowledge Workers;
Health Pandemics;
Time Management
- Article
Multitasking While Driving: A Time Use Study of Commuting Knowledge Workers to Assess Current and Future Uses
By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun and Orit Shaer
Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To achieve this goal, however, we need to develop a...
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- May 2022
- Article
The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns
By: Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer and Raffaella Sadun
We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270...
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- January–February 2022
- Article
Algorithm-Augmented Work and Domain Experience: The Countervailing Forces of Ability and Aversion
By: Ryan Allen and Prithwiraj Choudhury
How does a knowledge worker’s level of domain experience affect their algorithm-augmented work performance? We propose and test theoretical predictions that domain experience has countervailing effects on algorithm-augmented performance: on one hand, domain experience...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Who Benefits from Online Gig Economy Platforms?
By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
This paper estimates the magnitude and distribution of surplus from the knowledge worker gig economy using data from an online labor market. Labor demand elasticities determine workers’ wages, and buyers’ past market experience shapes both their job posting frequency...
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- March 2021
- Article
Experimenting During the Shift to Virtual Team Work: Learnings from How Teams Adapted Their Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Past research has focused on understanding the characteristics of work that are fully virtual or fully collocated. The present study seeks to expand our understanding of team work by studying knowledge workers' experiences as they were suddenly forced to transition to...
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- November–December 2020
- Article
Our Work-from-Anywhere Future
The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time
By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang
Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance, i.e., time zone separation between employees, on intra-firm communication,...
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- October 2020
- Article
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
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...
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- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside...
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- July–August 2020
- Article
Make the Most of Your Relocation
Although the COVID-19 crisis has halted travel in recent months, geographic mobility has become critical for managers and knowledge workers hoping to advance in today’s globalized economy, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. Geographic mobility can pay off...
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- July 2020
- Article
The Role of Interdependence in the Microfoundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence
By: Marlo Raveendran (formerly Goetting), Luciana Silvestri and Ranjay Gulati
Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the...
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- May 2019 (Revised October 2019)
- Teaching Note
ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (A) and (B)
By: Feng Zhu and Margaret Vo
Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 618-044 and 618-046.
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- 2018
- Article
Knowledge about Tuberculosis and Infection Prevention Behavior: A Nine City Longitudinal Study from India
By: Sophie Huddart, Thomas Bossuroy, Vincent Pons, Siddhartha Baral, Madhukar Pai and Clara Delavallade
Background
Improving patients’ tuberculosis (TB) knowledge is a salient component of TB control strategies. Patient knowledge of TB may encourage infection prevention behaviors and improve treatment adherence. The purpose of this study is to examine how... View Details
Improving patients’ tuberculosis (TB) knowledge is a salient component of TB control strategies. Patient knowledge of TB may encourage infection prevention behaviors and improve treatment adherence. The purpose of this study is to examine how... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Rumors and Refugees: How Government-Created Information Vacuums Undermine Effective Crisis Management
By: Melissa Carlson, Laura Jakli and Katerina Linos
Although more than 800,000 displaced people arrived in Greece by sea in 2015, fewer than 5 percent applied for asylum in this first country of arrival. Instead, they either traveled northward informally or remained in Greece in legal limbo. The resultant chaotic...
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- March 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Supplement
ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (B)
By: Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen and Shirley Sun
Supplements the (A) case.
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- January 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (A)
By: Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen and Shirley Sun
ZBJ.com (ZBJ), an online platform that connects knowledge workers to small- and medium-sized enterprises, is China’s largest outsourcing platform. Founded by Mingyue Zhu in 2006, ZBJ had grown into a unicorn with 4,000 employees and a daily transaction volume of RMB15...
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- Article
Your Sales Training Is Probably Lackluster. Here's How to Fix It
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Yuchun Lee
U.S. companies spend over $70 billion annually on training and an average of $1,459 per salesperson—almost 20% more than they spend on workers in all other functions. Yet, when it comes to equipping sales teams with relevant knowledge and skills, the ROI of sales...
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- May 2016
- Article
Return Migration and Geography of Innovation in MNEs: A Natural Experiment of Knowledge Production by Local Workers Reporting to Return Migrants
I study whether return migrants facilitate knowledge production by local employees working for them at geographically distant R&D locations. Using unique personnel and patenting data for 1,315 employees at the Indian R&D center of a Fortune 500 technology firm, I...
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