Journal of Operations Management最新文献

We take an extended perspective on project success that includes post-project outcomes as well as at-end and during-project success. To manage projects accordingly, we conceptualize three corresponding orders of uncertainty (outcomes, deliverables, and means uncertainties). We study 11 cases of behavioral intervention development (BID) projects to explore how managers handle each of the three orders of uncertainty to achieve post-project success—fully, partially, or not at all. Our analysis suggests several key insights. The hierarchical nature of multi-order uncertainty management implies that decreasing a higher-order uncertainty (e.g., outcomes) increases the next-lower order (e.g., deliverables). In the studied cases, reducing outcomes uncertainty tended to increase deliverables and means uncertainties—causing one step forward to seem like two steps backward. Thus, the sequence of uncertainty-management activities matters, with post-project success linked to reducing outcomes uncertainty before deliverables and means uncertainties. Violations of this sequencing were associated with uncertainty masking, a failure to acknowledge uncertainty that misdirected uncertainty-management activities. Moreover, the uncertainty-management activities must be timely, lest they become misaligned with other project activities. These findings elaborate the theorized relationships between uncertainty management and project success. We further outline how project managers can manage uncertainty by reframing outcomes, rescoping deliverables, and replanning means.

A holistic model encompassing a hospital patient engagement system and its relationship to the quality of provider-patient interactions is presented. Based on service-dominant logic, the study examined whether the effects on hospital performance of providers' systemic patient engagement efforts to enable value co-creation are fully mediated by experiential quality (realized patient engagement). The research model was tested via 2SLS regressions using survey data matched with secondary data. Mediation hypotheses were tested using bootstrapping. The results showed that experiential quality fully mediates the beneficial effects of a hospital patient engagement system on patient recommendation, readmission rate, return on assets, and excess margin. Post hoc tests confirmed the broad applicability of a hospital patient engagement system for reputational and financial advantage.

The transition to a circular economy hinges on effective brokerage—the work of intermediaries in connecting innovative closed-loop recyclers (the niche) with the established waste network (the regime). While brokerage theory and its classical tertius iungens/gaudens typology explain how a broker's strategic intent shapes their behaviors, it offers limited insight into how brokers operate at the niche-regime interface, a context defined by inherent tensions. This inductive study of a digital platform intermediary in the post-industrial textile waste contexts of Bangladesh and India addresses this by theorizing brokerage as a set of tension-derived strategies. Our empirical findings identify three tensions: network structure, operational capability, and socially sustainable capability tensions. We then show how the platform addresses these tensions through a dual role: structural brokerage, via semi-disintermediation, and capability brokerage, via standardization and legitimization. In addition, the platform engages in identity work to overcome its own challenge of being a new network actor. We contribute a novel contingent perspective on brokerage by unpacking a broker's response to inherent tensions in a transition period. The research also shows how technology-based intermediaries can be deployed to manage reverse flows, and it furthers understanding of how informal actors can be integrated into formal supply chains.

Changes in a buyer organization's incentives and structure can have a significant impact on supply chain performance, such as the quality of sourced components. We examine this relationship using data from a unique quasi-experiment where one of the two plants of a buyer introduced long-term quality improvement incentives and a more organic structure for supply chain engineers, while the other plant did not. Analyzing longitudinal component quality data from suppliers to both plants using difference-in-differences and triple-differences methods, we find that (i) the changes in incentives and structure led to differential improvements in supplier quality across the two plants, and (ii) suppliers did not easily transfer quality knowledge gained from one buyer relationship to others. Our paper contributes by showing that organizational redesign by a buyer focused on implicit incentives along with a supportive organic organizational structure can create a learning environment at its suppliers that can help improve the quality of sourced components and the learning generated does not necessarily spill over to other buyers.

For products developed through a collaboration of specialized groups, success requires craft and engineering ingenuity from designers who focus on specific attributes, coupled with synchronized coordination between various design groups. Although shared work experience in the team—or familiarity—can improve coordination, it can deter creativity. We empirically study the impact of team familiarity on market performance of products by focusing on product development in the video game industry by coupling a granular database of development credits with sales data for video games. Although familiarity among coordinators has a positive effect on performance, familiarity among designers has a negative effect. Further, the positive (negative) effect of familiarity among coordinators (designers) is present even if familiarity is built through roles other than coordination (design). Overall, team familiarity is associated with a decrease in the product's market performance. Our results suggest that infusing fluidity in design roles and maintaining stability in coordination roles could improve the performance of new products.

This multiple case study develops a mid-range theory on how frontline idea generation is affected by the actions of an organization's middle management. The study draws from four acute-care hospitals in Germany and involves 36 semi-structured interviews with representatives from all hierarchy levels. We use mission statements from these hospitals to measure top management's strategic intent regarding frontline idea generation. Then we analyze the idea generation performance of 156 nurses from the hospitals and link it to specific middle management behaviors. The cross-case analyses reveal that middle managers' shaping of nurses' innovation identity improves nurses' idea generation performance. However, this connection also means that middle managers' own forays into innovation can impede frontline idea generation. We find that middle managers' supportive behavior is largely independent of top management intent, a dynamic that offers both advantages and risks. These insights extend our knowledge about the role of middle managers in frontline idea generation.

Governments and regulatory agencies in emerging countries are increasingly enforcing labor and environmental protection laws. However, how this growing public governance interrelates with existing buyer-driven governance to influence supplier sustainability development remains unclear. To address this gap, we conducted a longitudinal case study involving two rounds of extensive data collection at nine Chinese suppliers of COSMOS, a European multinational company in the consumer electronics industry. We identify three distinctive configurations of how public governance and buyer-driven governance jointly influence supplier sustainability development. Identifying these configurations builds on prior research that distinguishes between competitive, complementary, and coexistent interactions between public and private governance. We extend this literature by uncovering the causal mechanisms through which each configuration gives rise to a unique sustainability development trajectory. Specifically, we unpack the different elements of each configuration and analyze their influence on suppliers' willingness and ability to pursue sustainability improvement. We conclude by delineating the boundary conditions that define the generalizability of our findings across contexts.

Service companies often adopt on-demand scheduling to balance labor costs and fluctuating market demand. However, research shows that such practices can reduce worker productivity and retention. In this study, we examine how on-demand scheduling affects two critical outcomes: worker absenteeism and patient dissatisfaction. We extend the conceptualization of undesirable scheduling by introducing schedule discontinuity—the presence of unpaid interruptions within a worker's daily schedule—alongside the more commonly studied schedule inconsistency, or variability in work hours across weeks. Using data on 1.2 million home care visits in a Canadian healthcare provider, we find that both schedule inconsistency and discontinuity significantly increase absenteeism and patient dissatisfaction. Specifically, moving from the 25th to 75th percentile in discontinuity (inconsistency) raises absenteeism by 20.00% (19.29%), and customer complaints by 27.33% (40.27%). To assess the practical implications for employers, we formulate and solve a schedule optimization problem that minimizes schedule discontinuity (or inconsistency), while satisfying demand and supply constraints. Applying a machine learning predictive model to these optimized schedules, we estimate reductions in the probability of absenteeism by 9.5% (8.2%) and in the probability of patient complaints by 7.7% (2.3%), demonstrating that modest scheduling adjustments can substantially improve worker and service outcomes.