Suchergebnisse

Work has an important role in terms of promoting wellbeing. However, it can also have negative effects on our physical and mental wellbeing leading to stress, fatigue, poor teamwork and engagement, and burnout. Many companies treat workers in terms of enterprise resources. Operations management often overlooks the 'human factor' and specifically, the relationship between worker wellbeing and performance, and the design of work management processes and associated technologies to support this. The impact of new work and workforce practices/trends such as the blended and flexible workforce along with new automation and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies enabling business process, performance/work, and workforce management, presents both risks and opportunities. This paper introduces a new work management concept – namely, 'intelligent work'. Intelligent work is defined in relation to work that is smart, health, ethical and safe. Critically, it is underpinned by concepts of workplace health protection and promotion, along with progress in automation and AI technologies. This concept has been advanced a part of a human factors action research program addressing responsible business, sponsored by the Irish government.

Project teams are regularly assembled by a variety of organizations in order to perform knowledge-intensive tasks. Previous shared experiences among their members can have a significant impact on team performance. In this study, we use a unique and detailed dataset of 6206 cardiac surgeries from a private hospital in Europe, property of an American non-profit organization, in order to examine how past shared experiences of individuals affect future team productivity. Using transactive memory system as theoretical framework, we first decompose overall team familiarity into horizontal familiarity (e.g. surgeon to surgeon) and hierarchical familiarity (e.g. surgeon to nurse) and find that the former one is more beneficial for team productivity than the latter one. Next, we observe that horizontal familiarity of high-power, high-status individuals has a higher impact on team productivity than the one among subordinate individuals. Finally, we investigate how past failure experiences of individuals in the same team can increase future team productivity more than past shared successes. Our results provide useful insights for managers who aim to increase team productivity via better team allocation strategies.