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When Does The Devil Make Work? An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Workload On Worker Productivity, Tom Tan, Serguei Netessine

IT & Operations Management Research

We analyze a large, detailed operational data set from a restaurant chain to shed new light on how workload (defined as the number of tables or diners that a server simultaneously handles) affects servers’ performance (measured as sales and meal duration). We use an exogenous shock - the implementation of labor scheduling software - and time-lagged instrumental variables to disentangle the endogeneity between demand and supply in this setting. We show that servers strive to maximize sales and speed efforts simultaneously, depending on the relative values of sales and speed. As a result, we find that, when the overall workload …