When You Work with a Superman, Will You Also Fly? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Coworkers on Performance

Tom Fangyun Tan () and Serguei Netessine ()
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Tom Fangyun Tan: Cox Business School, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 75275
Serguei Netessine: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Management Science, 2019, vol. 65, issue 8, 3495-3517

Abstract: We examine a large operational data set in a casual restaurant setting to study how coworkers’ sales ability level affects other workers’ sales performance. We find that waiters react nonlinearly to their coworkers’ ability. In particular, when coworkers’ overall sales ability is low, increasing this ability may prompt waiters to redouble both upselling and cross-selling efforts. When overall coworkers’ ability is high, however, further increasing their ability may trigger waiters to reduce sales efforts. Our empirical findings imply that, to maximize sales, managers should mix waiters with heterogeneous ability levels during the same shift. Through a counterfactual analysis, we find that considering the inverted U-shaped peer effects when optimizing current waiters’ schedules without changing their utilization may increase total sales by approximately 2.48% at no extra cost.

Keywords: peer effects; behavioral operations management; scheduling/rostering; empirical labor decisions in service operations; restaurant operations; people-centric operations; data-driven analytics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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