Browsing by Author "Gokpinar, Bilal"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    Task Variety in Professional Service Work: When It Helps and When It Hurts
    (Sage Journals, 2018-03-23) Avgerinos, Emmanouil; Gokpinar, Bilal; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
    In a wide range of professional service firms, individuals perform a variety of tasks which are highly cognitive and knowledge intensive yet repetitive in nature, providing significant opportunities for learning. In addition, individuals in such environments tend to enjoy considerable discretion in managing when and how they perform their tasks. In light of these observations, we investigate task allocation and timing strategies that may enhance or inhibit learning and productivity for professional service workers. Specifically, we focus on the role of task variety. We use a detailed dataset of 3,275 coronary artery bypass surgeries in a private European hospital over seven years to examine the effect of concurrent and non-concurrent exposure to task variety on learning and productivity on a focal task. We find that while concurrent exposure to variety has a positive impact on focal productivity, non-concurrent exposure to variety has a negative impact on it. Our results also suggest that short term exposure to variety amplifies these relationships.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    The effect of failure on performance over time: The case of cardiac surgery operations
    (Wiley, 2019-11-11) Avgerinos, Emmanouil; Fragkos, Ioannis; Gokpinar, Bilal; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
    Failure is a common occurrence in many operational contexts involving knowledge work. Concentrating on highly critical cardiac surgery operations, we investigate how failure affects subsequent performance over time. In addressing our research questions, we draw on the sensemaking perspective and incorporate behavioral aspects of failure that are often overlooked. We develop three hypotheses on the effects of failure (i.e., in-hospital mortality of a patient) and test them with a unique data set of 4,306 cardiac surgery operations from a large European hospital, spanning five years. Our findings show that while failure promotes learning over time and improves task execution quality (as measured by patients' reduced length of stay) in the long term, its effect is the opposite in the short term. Our work also unravels how relational dynamics (i.e., familiarity) may reduce the short-term effects of failure. We find evidence that team familiarity mitigates the detrimental effects of recent failures. This implies that certain team assignment strategies after failure (e.g., putting individuals into familiar teams) may be preferable than others. We explore and illustrate this by conducting a policy simulation based on our data. This article provides new insights into how operations managers can support their employees in moving forward after failure.