Journal of Operations Management最新文献

Agricultural commodity supply networks in the Global South are essential for securing the global supply of crops and livestock. However, they are challenged by power asymmetries, which cause injustice and jeopardize social equity, environmental stewardship, and economic viability for disadvantaged actors. To address this challenge, it is imperative to understand how power impacts justice and sustainability. To this end, we examined a supply network in Mato Grosso, Brazil, that faced power asymmetries through 49 semi-structured interviews, field observations, and archival data. The analysis unveiled three forms of power use—excessive, strategic, and balanced—and associated tactics, impacting justice and sustainability outcomes in various ways. We illustrate, for example, how excessive power manifested in traders' abusive tactics, who compelled farmers to accept quality discounts due to external factors, such as heavy rain or poor road conditions. In response to these injustices, farmers cascaded the pressure through the supply network, disproportionately affecting disadvantaged actors, for instance, by withholding rural workers' wages for low productivity or eradicating wildlife deemed detrimental to profitability. Based on these findings, we provide a set of six propositions and a theoretical model that elucidate how power can be leveraged to foster fairer and more sustainable agricultural commodity supply networks.

Condition-based preventive maintenance (CB-PM), dependent on robust and precise indicators of equipment quality, stands to gain advantages from the integration of sensor technologies. Yet, the effectiveness of such systems relies on an important factor: people. Even in possession of ideal CB-PM policies, imperfect adherence can lead to higher equipment downtime, maintenance costs, and increased safety hazards. Here, we describe a normative model of optimal CB-PM policy determination; specifically, a generalized means by which to determine a valuemaximizing quality threshold as a guideline for triggering PM (preventative maintenance). Motivated by field data, we consider the opportunity cost of not adhering to such optimal policies; that is, premature or delayed responses. We design and execute a controlled laboratory study, exposing participants to two critical manipulations that we theorize might influence adherence: (1) The presence of a supplemental secondary signal, of a type common to time-based preventive maintenance (TB-PM), (2) a pre-task priming intended to emphasize the value of discretized task completion. Results showed that the combination of CB-PM and TB-PM signals, along with completion priming, significantly increases adherence to CB-PM guidelines. We demonstrate that individuals exposed to this combination of treatments forfeit far less value than those receiving CB-PM signals alone.

Stroke is a highly time-sensitive medical emergency, and earlier treatment is crucial. Drawing on Temporal Motivation Theory, we investigate a “deadline effect” in stroke care and analyze how two deadlines, that is, a medically oriented one (administering Tissue Plasminogen Activator, TPA, within 4.5 h of symptom onset) and a goal-oriented one (the 60-min in-hospital target from Target:Stroke), shape care consistency. We define a deadline effect as a variable task processing rate under time pressure from a pending task completion deadline, which can cause inconsistent care. Clinicians may work more slowly when patients arrive soon after symptom onset, given ample time remains before the 4.5-h TPA window. Using an accelerated-failure-time model and addressing patient selection bias, we find that shorter onset-to-door times correlate with longer door-to-needle times, and vice versa, confirming the medically oriented deadline effect. As a result, care time may vary considerably based on how much of the TPA window remains. Under Target:Stroke, a goal-driven national initiative in the United States to improve stroke care quality, stroke teams face an additional 60-min in-hospital deadline. Our findings show that the initiative prompts stroke teams to prioritize the tighter goal and maintain a more consistent care pace, regardless of patients' arrival times. Our mechanism analyses reveal two boundary conditions for the main findings: (i) when the downstream time segment ends with a mid-point patient care milestone rather than the strict TPA administration deadline or (ii) when the system congestion level is high, the main findings do not hold, advancing the deadline effect literature from an operational standpoint. Furthermore, our major findings are robust to other confounding factors and model assumptions, ruling out alternative explanations. Notably, post hoc analyses confirm that Target:Stroke fosters consistent time performance without adversely affecting other health outcomes, advocating its efficacy. In sum, we highlight the operational implications of multiple deadlines in stroke care, extending the broader deadline effect literature. For hospital clinicians, properly set goals can stabilize care processes and strengthen overall performance, emphasizing the strategic value of well-designed deadlines in time-critical healthcare settings.

Despite a growing focus on blockchain adoption within operations and supply chains, these initiatives exhibit an exceedingly high failure rate, with many failing to achieve sustainable success. Why are enterprise blockchain adoptions highly susceptible to failure? In our inductive case study of five technology providers offering blockchain services for operations and supply chains, we examine how founders' power (i.e., expert, prestige, and ownership) shapes management behaviors that build blockchain perceptions and influence stakeholders toward strategic adoption. Our findings reveal that high-performing cases actively seek inspiration beyond the blockchain ecosystem for service designs and adopt a centralized decision-making approach where key strategic decisions are made internally. In contrast, low-performing cases struggle due to within-blockchain exploration and decentralized decision-making, leading to slower implementation and limited scalability. Furthermore, we find that founders' behaviors in blockchain adoption are embraced by firm members through performance evaluation and interactions, shaping organizational practices and culture, ultimately determining the success or failure of blockchain technology providers. This study extends previous research at the intersection of founders' power and blockchain literature by developing propositions about how different sources of founders' power lead to distinct management behaviors, influencing the success or failure of blockchain adoption outcomes.

The rapid adoption of omni-channel strategies has prompted grocery retailers to reconfigure their back-end fulfillment operations to efficiently and effectively meet the demands of online and offline retail channels. Viewing back-end fulfillment operations in omni-channel grocery retail as a complex adaptive system, we present an eight-year multi-method case study of the UK operations of a leading global grocery retailer. Over this period the share of online sales significantly grew as proportion of overall sales. We observe four evolutions in the back-end fulfillment complex adaptive system to respond to the operational demands associated with increasing online sales. Complex adaptive systems theory suggests that such evolutions should eventually lead to a state of equilibrium, where the system is reconfigured to effectively and efficiently respond to the market. However, we observe that this equilibrium was never achieved and propose this results from two opposing and irreconcilable environmental energies preventing optimal adaptation. Drawing on both in-depth interviews and a proprietary fulfillment dataset from the organization, we expose the implications of conflicting energies being imported from the environment, and propose three strategies, drawn from paradox theory, for reconciling these energies within a complex adaptive system.