Can Employees' Past Helping Behavior Be Used to Improve Shift Scheduling? Evidence from ICU Nurses

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jiang, Zhaohui (Zoey); Silberholz, John; Wang, Yixin (Iris); Costa, Deena Kelly; Sjoding, Michael
• 署名单位: Carnegie Mellon University; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Yale University; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.00465
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: nurse scheduling; ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOR; hospital operations; empirical operations

摘要

Employees routinely make valuable contributions at work that are not part of their formal job description, such as helping a struggling coworker. These contributions, termed organizational citizenship behavior, are studied from many angles in the organizational behavior literature. However, the degree to which the past helping behavior of employees scheduled to a shift impacts that shift's operational outcomes remains an underexplored question. We define two measures of past helping behavior for members of a shift-the total past helping of each employee and the past helping between each pair of employees-and hypothesize that they are associated with shift performance. We empirically confirm our hypotheses with detailed scheduling and patient outcome data from six intensive care units (ICUs) at a large academic medical center, using the hospital's electronic medical records to identify cases of one nurse helping another. Our empirical results indicate that both measures of past helping are predictive of patient length of stay (LOS), more so than the broadly studied notion of team familiarity. Counterfactual analysis shows that relatively small changes in shift composition can yield significant reduction in total LOS, indicating the managerial significance of the results. Overall, our study suggests the potential value of shift scheduling using data on past helping behaviors, and this may have promise far beyond the selected application to ICU nursing.