Bradley R. Staats

Breaking Them in or Eliciting Their Best? Reframing Socialization around Newcomers’ Authentic Self-expression:

Socialization theory has focused on enculturating new employees such that they develop pride in their new organization and internalize its values. We draw on authenticity research to theorize that the initial stage of socialization leads to more effective employment relationships when it instead primarily encourages newcomers to express their personal identities. In a field experiment carried out in a large business process outsourcing company in India, we found that initial socialization focused on personal identity (emphasizing newcomers’ authentic best selves) led to greater customer satisfaction and employee retention after six months than socialization that focused on organizational identity (emphasizing the pride to be gained from organizational affiliation) or the organization’s traditional approach, which focused primarily on skills training. To confirm causation and explore the mechanisms underlying the effects, we replicated the results in a laboratory experiment in a U.S. university. We found that individuals working temporarily as part of a research team were more engaged and satisfied with their work, performed their tasks more effectively, and were less likely to quit when initial socialization focused on personal identity rather than on organizational identity or a control condition. In addition, authentic self-expression mediated these relationships. We call for a new direction in socialization theory that examines how both organizations and employees can benefit by emphasizing newcomers’ authentic best selves.

Accumulating a Portfolio of Experience: The Effect of Focal and Related Experience on Surgeon Performance

One key driver of improvement in surgical outcomes is a surgeons prior experience. However, research notes that not all experience provides equal value for performance. How, then, should surgeons accumulate experience to improve quality outcomes? In this paper, we investigate the differential effects of focal and related (i.e., tasks similar to, but not identical to, the focal task) experience. We open up the black box of the volume-outcome relationship by going beyond just dividing experience into focal and related categories, but also considering how subtasks and context (i.e., the organization in which the work takes place) affect performance. To understand these issues, we assemble a novel data set on 71 cardiothoracic surgeons who performed more than 6,500 procedures during a period of 10 years after the introduction of a breakthrough surgical procedure. We find that, as compared to related experience, surgeon focal experience has a greater effect on surgeon performance. We also demonstrate that subtask experience has different, nonlinear performance relationships for focal and related experience. Finally, we find that focal experience is more firm specific than related experience and that nonfirm experience reduces the learning rate for both focal and related experience. We discuss implications of our findings for healthcare delivery and operations management.

The Impact of Time at Work and Time Off From Work on Rule Compliance: The Case of Hand Hygiene in Health Care

To deliver high-quality, reliable, and consistent services safely, organizations develop professional standards. Despite the communication and reinforcement of these standards, they are often not followed consistently. Although previous research suggests that high job demands are associated with declines in compliance over lengthy intervals, we hypothesized-drawing on theoretical arguments focused on fatigue and depletion-that the impact of job demands on routine compliance with professional standards might accumulate much more quickly. To test this hypothesis, we studied a problem that represents one of the most significant compliance challenges in health care today: hand hygiene. Using longitudinal field observations of over 4,157 caregivers working in 35 different hospitals and experiencing more than 13.7 million hand hygiene opportunities, we found that hand hygiene compliance rates dropped by a regression-estimated 8.7 percentage points on average from the beginning to the end of a typical 12-hr work shift. This decline in compliance was magnified by increased work intensity. Further, longer breaks between work shifts increased subsequent compliance rates, and such benefits were greater for individuals when they had ended their preceding shift with a lower compliance rate. In addition, (a) the decline in compliance over the course of a work shift and (b) the improvement in compliance following a longer break increased as individuals accumulated more total work hours the preceding week. The implications of these findings for patient safety and job design are discussed.

Team familiarity, role experience, and performance: evidence from indian software services

Much of the literature on team learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume of, or the number of projects completed by, a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership and internal organization. In practice, however, such stability is rare, as the composition and structure of teams often changes over time or between projects. In this paper, we use detailed data from an Indian software services firm to examine how such changes may affect the accumulation of experience within, and the performance of, teams. We find that the level of team familiarity (i.e., the average number of times that each member has worked with every other member of the team) has a significant positive effect on performance, but we observe that conventional measures of the experience of individual team members (e.g., years at the firm) are not consistently related to performance. We do find, however, that the role experience of individuals in a team (i.e., years in a given role within a team) is associated with better team performance. Our results offer an approach for capturing the experience held by fluid teams and highlight the need to study context-specific measures of experience, including role experience. In addition, our findings provide insight into how the interactions of team members may contribute to the development of broader firm capabilities.

Volume Flexibility in Services: The Costs and Benefits of Flexible Labor Resources

Organizations can create volume flexibility---the ability to increase capacity up or down to meet demand for a single service---through the use of flexible labor resources e.g., part-time and temporary workers, as compared to full-time workers. Although organizations are increasingly using these resources, the relationship between flexible labor resources and financial performance has not been examined empirically in the service setting. We use two years of archival data from 445 stores of a large retailer to study this relationship. We hypothesize and find that increasing the labor mix of temporary or part-time workers shows an inverted U-shaped relationship with sales and profit while temporary labor mix has a U-shaped relationship with expenses. Thus, although flexible labor resources can create volume flexibility for a firm along multiple dimensions, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

Learning from Customers: Individual and Organizational Effects in Outsourced Radiological Services

The ongoing fragmentation of work has resulted in a narrowing of tasks into smaller pieces that can be sent outside the organization and, in many instances, around the world. This trend is shifting the boundaries of organizations and leading to increased outsourcing. Though the consolidation of volume may lead to productivity improvement, little is known about how this shift toward outsourcing influences learning by providers of outsourced services. When producing output, the content of the knowledge gained can vary from one unit to the next. One dimension along which output can vary—a dimension with particular relevance in outsourcing—is the end customer for whom it is produced. The performance benefits of such customer experience remain largely unexamined. We explore this dimension of volume-based learning in a setting where doctors at an outsourcing firm complete radiological reads for hospital customers. We examine more than 2.7 million cases read by 97 radiologists for 1,431 customers and find evidence supporting the benefits of customer-specific experience accumulated by individual radiologists. Additionally, we find that variety in an individual’s customer experience may increase the rate of individual learning from customer-specific experience for a focal task. Finally, we find that the level of experience with a customer for the entire outsourcing firm also yields learning and that the degree of customer depth moderates the impact of customer-specific experience at the individual level. We discuss the implications of our results for the study of learning as well as for providers and consumers of outsourced services.

Motivating Process Compliance Through Individual Electronic Monitoring: An Empirical Examination of Hand Hygiene in Healthcare

The design and use of standard processes are foundational recommendations in many operations practices. Yet, given the demonstrated performance benefits of standardized processes, it is surprising that they are often not followed consistently. One way to ensure greater compliance is by electronically monitoring the activities of individuals, although such aggressive monitoring poses the risk of inducing backlash. In the setting of hand hygiene in healthcare, a context where compliance with standard processes is frequently less than 50% and where this lack of compliance can result in negative consequences, we investigated the effectiveness of electronic monitoring. We did so using a unique, radio frequency identification (RFID)-based system deployed in 71 hospital units. We found that electronically monitoring individual compliance resulted in a large, positive increase in compliance. We also found that there was substantial variability in the effect across units and that units with higher levels of preact...

Lean Principles, Learning, and Software Production: Evidence from Indian Software Services

While the concepts of lean production are frequently applied in service organizations there is little work that rigorously has examined implementing lean production in contexts other than manufacturing as well as lean productions impact on performance in these settings. In this paper we set out to accomplish both tasks by investigating the implementation of a lean production system at an Indian software services firm. Combining a detailed case study and empirical analysis we document the internal processes that the lean initiative influences. We find that lean projects perform better than the non-lean projects in our sample in many, but not all cases. Building on this result we see that the impact of the techniques on problem solving, coordination, and standardization of work improve the way that the firm learns as well as its productivity. In so doing, we gain insight into how a company can build an operations-based advantage.

Driven by Social Comparisons: How Feedback about Coworkers’ Effort Influences Individual Productivity

Drawing on theoretical insights from research on social comparison processes, this article explores how managers can use performance feedback to sustain employees’ motivation and performance in organizations. Using a field experiment at a Japanese bank, we investigate the effects of valence (positive versus negative), type (direct versus indirect), and timing of feedback (one-shot versus persistent) on employee productivity. Our results show that direct negative feedback (e.g., an employee learns her performance falls in the bottom of her group) leads to improvements in employees’ performance, while direct positive feedback does not significantly impact performance. Furthermore, indirect negative feedback (i.e., the employee learns she is not in the bottom of her group) worsens productivity while indirect positive feedback (i.e., the employee learns she is not in the top of her group) does not affect it. Finally, both persistently positive and persistently negative feedback lead to improvements in employees’ performance. Together, our findings offer insight into the role of performance feedback in motivating productivity in repetitive tasks.

Maintaining Beliefs in the Face of Negative News: The Moderating Role of Experience

Many models in operations management involve dynamic decision making that assumes optimal updating in response to information revelation. However, behavioral theory suggests that rather than updating their beliefs, individuals may persevere in their prior beliefs. In particular, we examine how individuals’ prior experiences and the experiences of those around them alter their belief perseverance in operational decisions after the revelation of negative news. We draw on an exogenous announcement of negative news by the Food and Drug Administration and explore how it affects interventional cardiologists deciding between two types of cardiac stents. Analyzing 147,000 choices over six years, we find that individuals do respond to negative news by using the focal production tool less often. However, we find that both individuals’ own experiences and others’ experiences alter their responses. Moreover, although individual and other experience act as substitutes before negative news, we find that this substituti...