Supply Chain Management and Management Science: A Successful Marriage

The last century has witnessed extant studies on the applications of Management Science (MS) to a diverse set of Supply Chain Management (SCM) issues. This paper provides an overview of the contribution of MS within SCM. A framework is developed in this paper with a sampling of MS contributions to major SCM dimensions. Future research directions are presented

Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can increase their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly. As the number of tasks increases, however, workers may also manage their workload by a different process – task selection. Drawing on research on workload, individual discretion, and behavioral decision making we theorize and then test that under conditions of increased workload individuals may choose to complete easier tasks in order to manage their load. We label this behavior Task Completion Bias (TCB). Using two years of data from a hospital emergency department we find support for TCB and also show that it improves short-term productivity. However, although it improves performance in the short-term we find that an overreliance on this task selection strategy hurts performance – as measured both by speed and revenue – in the long run. We then turn to the lab to replicate conceptually the task selection effect and show that it occurs due to the positive feelings individuals get from task completion. These findings provide an alternative mechanism for the workload-speedup effect from the literature. We also discuss implications for both research and the practice of operations in building systems to help people succeed in both the short and long run

Behavioral Operations Management in Federal Governance

The environmental uncertainty of federal politics and acquisition outsourcing in competitive markets requires an adaptive decision-analysis structure. Practitioners oriented toward exclusively static methods face severe challenges in understanding qualitative aspects of organizational governance. The purpose of this grounded theory study was to examine and understand behavioral relationship attributes within intuitive, choice, judgment, or preference decision-making processes. The problem addressed in this study was the detrimental effects of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), compulsory citizenship behavior (CCB), and social exchange theory (SET) on the acquisition management relationship The OCB, CCB, SET dictates that sound business development, relationship acumen, emotional intelligence and perceptiveness transcend pure numerical quantification. Exhibition of relationship-based attributes influence and drive long-term contractual relationships and the sustainability of business organizations. The data collected included historical data and survey responses. Approximately 34,000 acquisition professionals comprised the population-sampling frame. The study sample consisted of 378 survey responses that yielded 294 qualifying respondents with 94 disqualifications that produced a 78% response rate. The Carnegie-Mellon behavioral survey guidelines underpinned questionnaire construction and affirmation of themes. Strauss and Corbin grounded theory and theme generation addressed behavioral decision making under the additive model that inform the development of an organizational social operations and business framework that accounts for intuitive judgment. The study may contribute to positive social change by orienting managers toward behavioral decision making, ensuring responsiveness to the public and federal governanc