Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(162)
- Faculty Publications (48)
- September 2014 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Belk: Towards Exceptional Scheduling
By: Ethan Bernstein, Saravanan Kesavan, Bradley Staats and Luke Hassall
With 24,000 staff and over 300 stores, Belk Inc. sought to replace its entirely manual labor scheduling system with an automated software solution from Reflexis. Belk hoped the upgrade would simplify scheduling, reduce time employees spent in non-customer-facing roles,... View Details
Keywords: Retail; Scheduling; Local Autonomy; Automation; Metrics; Organizational Change; Human Resource Management; Process Improvement; Performance Measurement; Transparency; Southern United States; Retailing; Department Stores; System Outsourced Services; Employee Relationship Management; Selection and Staffing; Change Management; Governance Controls; Resource Allocation; Service Operations; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Evaluation; Performance Improvement; Applications and Software; Family Business; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; United States
- 2014
- Article
Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity
By: Jooa Julia Lee, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats
People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we predict and find that bad weather increases individual productivity and that... View Details
- May 2014
- Conference Presentation
When Does Turnover Impact Project Outcomes: When You Do Not Know It's Coming?
By: Hise O. Gibson, Bradley R. Staats and Ananth Raman
- September–October 2013
- Article
Learning from Customers: Individual and Organizational Effects in Outsourced Radiological Services
By: Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
The ongoing fragmentation of work has resulted in a narrowing of tasks into smaller pieces that can be sent outside the organization and, in many instances, around the world. This trend is shifting the boundaries of organizations and leading to increased outsourcing.... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
The Microwork Solution: A New Approach to Outsourcing Can Support Economic Development—and Add to Your Bottom Line
By: Francesca Gino and Bradely R. Staats
What's the best way to lift people out of poverty? The social entrepreneurs in the new "impact sourcing" industry believe the answer is providing work, not aid. Their organizations hire people at the bottom of the pyramid to perform digital tasks such as transcribing... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity
By: Jooa Julia Lee, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats
People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Most people believe that bad weather conditions reduce productivity. In this research, we predict and find just... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Inequality in Knowledge Repository Use in Scaling Service Operations
By: Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson
To scale service operations requires sharing knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge sharing networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository (KR)... View Details
- December 2011 (Revised June 2012)
- Case
Samasource: Give Work, Not Aid
By: Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats
Samasource sought to use work, not aid, for economic development. The company secured contracts for digital services from large companies in the United States and Europe, divided the work up into small pieces (called microwork) and then sent it to delivery centers in... View Details
- Article
Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance
By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences... View Details
- January 2011
- Case
Program Management at Wipro Technologies
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Bradley R. Staats and Melissa Valentine
This case examines the execution of one program by Wipro Technologies, an Indian software services provider. The case also explores the evolution of program management at Wipro. View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Learning from Customers: Individual and Organizational Effects in Outsourced Radiological Services
By: Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
The ongoing fragmentation of work has resulted in a narrowing of tasks into smaller pieces that can be sent outside the organization and, in many instances, around the world. This trend is shifting the boundaries of organizations and leading to increased outsourcing.... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank
By: Bradley R. Staats and Francesca Gino
Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design related strategies for accomplishing this goal: specialization to capture the benefits of repetition... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Dynamically Integrating Knowledge in Teams: Transforming Resources into Performance
By: Heidi K. Gardner, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats
In knowledge-based environments, teams must develop a systematic approach to integrating knowledge resources throughout the course of projects in order to perform effectively. Yet, many teams fail to do so. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we examine how... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised April 2010)
- Case
Merger Integration at Bank of America: The TrustWeb Project
By: Gary P. Pisano and Bradley R. Staats
This case explores project management in a large organization through the eyes of a young project manager, Mike Morris. Morris is tasked with leading a project within the overall merger integration effort at Bank of America. Morris encounters difficulties with managing... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Varied Experience, Team Familiarity, and Learning: The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety
By: Bradley R. Staats, Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano
Prior work examining the relationship of varied experience (i.e., the concurrent completion of multiple tasks) and learning by groups finds inconsistent results. We hypothesize that team familiarity, i.e, individuals' prior shared work experience, may help explain this... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance
By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes, by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences... View Details
- April 2009
- Journal Article
Perspectives on the Productivity Dilemma
By: Paul S. Adler, Mary Benner, David James Brunner, John Paul MacDuffie, Emi Osono, Bradley R. Staats, Hirotaka Takeuchi, Michael Tushman and Sidney G. Winter
For more than a century, operations researchers have recognized that organizations can increase efficiency by adhering strictly to proven process templates, thereby rendering operations more stable and predictable. For several decades, researchers have also recognized... View Details
- January 2009
- Article
Team Familiarity, Role Experience, and Performance: Evidence from Indian Software Services
By: Robert S. Huckman, Bradley R. Staats and David M. Upton
Much of the literature on team learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume of, or the number of projects completed by, a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Variation in Experience and Team Familiarity: Addressing the Knowledge Acquisition-Application Problem
By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
Prior work in organizational learning has failed to find a consistent effect of variation in experience on performance. While some studies find a positive relationship between these two variables, others find no effect or even a negative relationship. In this paper, we... View Details