Employee-Task Assignments for Organization Modeling: A Review of Models and Applications

In this study, we present a review of task assignment problems in organizations, an area that has become more important as tasks become more complex and personnel skills become more specialized. The challenge is to design task assignments that meet all requirements and result in the best organizational performance. The consequences of poor design include failed tasks, reduced efficiency, and inability to meet deadlines. Moreover, inequity of workload between employees can cause lack of job satisfaction, loss of motivation and also boredom. In general, work processes in organizations consist of different tasks, which require different expertise. Personnel usually have various degrees of qualifications and their performance may vary for different tasks. The outcome of the work process depends heavily on which tasks are assigned to which personnel. Performance of an organization can be increased by assigning the tasks to the most qualified available personnel. However, it could result in overloading some personnel while the others remain under-loaded. So, the even distribution of the workload between them also needs to be taken into consideration. In addition, it helps to increase organization\u27s productivity by distributing personnel\u27s knowledge, time, and attention more extensively. We review task-employee assignment problems in organization modeling with the computational models that have been reported in the literature with their applications. Human factors engineering, in terms of workload in organizational modeling is included as the work process performance is heavily dependent on the human (personnel). Based on the initial findings, we propose to investigate an improved workload model that allows the use of optimization of select constraints, such as balancing workload among team members. While current workload models allow the evaluation of workload among team members interacting in a work process, it is up to the analyst to suggest improvements. By providing an optimized solution, we present the Engineering Manager, that can then be adjusted to meet practical criteria

Secure mobile edge server placement using multi-agent reinforcement learning

Funding Information: Funding: This work is supported by King Khaled University under Grant Agreement No. 6204.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Understanding employee resourcing in construction organizations

In recent years the literature on employee resourcing has consistently advocated the importance of adopting a holistic, strategic approach to employee deployment decision making rather than adopting a reactive needs-based approach. This is particularly problematic in construction where the multi-project environment leads to constantly changing resource requirements and to changing demands over a project's life cycle. This can lead to inappropriate decisions, which fail to meet the longer-term needs of both construction organizations and their employees. A structured and comprehensive understanding of the current project team deployment practices within large construction organizations was developed. Project deployment practices were examined within seven case study contracting firms. The emergent themes that shaped the decision-making processes were grouped into five broad clusters comprising human resource planning, performance/career management, team deployment, employee involvement and training and development. The research confirms that a reactive and ad hoc approach to the function prevails within the firms investigated. This suggests a weak relationship between the deployment process and human resource planning, team deployment, performance management, employee involvement and training and development activities. It is suggested that strategic HR-business partnering could engender more transparent and productive relationships in this crucial area

The Effect of Two Types of Workload Assignment on Productivity, Performance, and Stress

The importance of employees within a firm has led to an increased need in maximizing performance and productivity, while also minimizing the stress levels of employees. This study provides insight into two types of workload assignment of (1) receiving a task all at once, or (2) receiving a task broken up. It investigates how matching subjects’ workload assignment preference (WAP) can impact performance, productivity, and stress levels. The results showed that there was an even split in workload assignment preference across the population, and that employees who received a task based on their preferred type of workload assignment improved in performance and productivity, while having decreased stress levels. This shows that employees’ workload assignment preference can be used to more properly assign tasks to each employee which can lead to increased performance and productivity, and decreased stress levels

Workforce Capacity Planning Using Zero-One-Integer Programming

Non

Education for power: English language in the workplace

Developed countries around the world are increasingly competing for highly skilled, educated immigrants. A case in point is Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). The NZ Immigration Service actively encourages skilled migrants, and around the country there are numerous English language programmes focussing on English for employment. The dominant focus of these programmes is on migrants' acquisition of correct, appropriate language form, with some attention to intercultural communication. In the view of the authors, this focus is reductionist and provides inadequate preparation for communication in the workplace. This article considers ambiguity and power relations in positioning and interpreting migrant employees in the workplace. Two sets of data are drawn upon. First, a workplace ethnography in a 'migrant friendly' NZ engineering office reveals a management culture that exercises the power of the dominant Anglo-Saxon population to control and exclude a Japanese migrant engineer. Second, a published analysis of immigrant employees' interactions is revisited in order to interrogate the interpretation of workplace texts and underlying discourses of 'appropriate' workplace language. The analysis traces implications for both formal and informal education, and the discussion raises larger questions of social justice concerning migrants

The irresistible rise of managerial control? The case of workload allocation models in British universities

This chapter investigates the role and practice of Workload Allocation Models (WAM), as managerial devices used at system and institutional level to coordinate academic work. Our data is drawn from a survey in five British institutions with 581 respondents overall. WAM appear to be widely known, understood and used, however, in the perception of academic staff, they do not reflect accurately the allocation of time to academic activities. In this sense, our analysis points to the limits of WAM to manage academic work at institutional level. Specifically, it highlights the differences in how WAM are used according to employment contracts – combined teaching and research, teaching-only, research-only and to terms of employment – open-ended and fixed-term contracts. Our findings point to the significant persistence of academic normative frameworks, in which research is considered a key activity for career prospects regardless of job descriptions. Overall, our chapter illustrates how the tensions between academic and managerial logics play out in the practice of WAM, and discusses the implications thereof at systemic, institutional and academic levels

Organizational support for intrapreneurship and its interaction with human capital to enhance innovative performance

This study explores the impacts of the internal supportive environment for intrapreneurial activities on firms’ innovative performance and the moderating role of human capital in this relationship by making use of a questionnaire study covering 184 manufacturing firms in Turkey. As for the individual direct effects of the dimensions of Organizational Support (OS), Management Support for Idea Generation and Tolerance for Risk Taking are found to exert positive effects on innovative performance. Availability of a Performance Based Reward System and Free Time have no impact on innovativeness, while Work Discretion has a negative one. As for the role of Human Capital (HC), it is found to be an important driver of innovative performance especially when the OS is limited. However, when the levels of both HC and OS are high, innovative performance does not further increase, probably reaching a temporary performance ceiling. Managerial and further research implications are provided

Short-term manpower management in manufacturing systems: new requirements and DSS prototyping

The short-term planning and scheduling of discrete manufacturing systems has mostly focused in the past on the management of machines, implicitly considered as the critical resources of the workshops. Some of the present schedulers claim to also manage human resources, but perform most of the time a local allocation of operators to machines, these operators having regular working hours. However, it seems clear that the workforce has a specificity that should be better taken into account by short-term planning facilities. Moreover, the variability of the weekly working hours through the year will shortly become a rule and not anymore an exception. On the base of a questionnaire answered by 19 French companies of different sizes and industrial sectors, we have tried to identify more precisely some industrial requirements concerning the short-term management of human resources. The growing interest in annualised hours together with the lack of software tools that allow to implement it practically is one of the results of this questionnaire. We suggest in this article the specification of a decision support system for short-term manpower management under annualised hours, taking into account the competence of the operators. A software prototype has been developed according to these specifications; the results of a simple but representative example are described

Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a review of the state of the art in OR/MS

We provide a structured overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a review of relevant OR/MS articles for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making