When You Work with a Superman, Will You Also Fly? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Coworkers on Performance

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Tan, Tom Fangyun; Netessine, Serguei
• 署名单位: Southern Methodist University; University of Pennsylvania
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3135
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 3495-3517
• 关键词: Peer effects; Behavioral operations management; scheduling/rostering; empirical labour decisions in service operations; restaurant operations; people-centric operations; data-driven analytics

摘要

We examine a large operational data set in a casual restaurant setting to study how coworkers' sales ability level affects other workers' sales performance. We find that waiters react nonlinearly to their coworkers' ability. In particular, when coworkers' overall sales ability is low, increasing this ability may prompt waiters to redouble both upselling and cross-selling efforts. When overall coworkers' ability is high, however, further increasing their ability may trigger waiters to reduce sales efforts. Our empirical findings imply that, to maximize sales, managers should mix waiters with heterogeneous ability levels during the same shift. Through a counterfactual analysis, we find that considering the inverted U-shaped peer effects when optimizing current waiters' schedules without changing their utilization may increase total sales by approximately 2.48% at no extra cost.