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We examine a switch of alternative digitalized task assignment systems that are based on a novel smartwatch-based technology. The established task assignment system delegates tasks directly to workers and should optimize productivity, assuming that workers act fully rational. However, the production faces challenges that are rooted in human agency and lack of autonomy. Combining theories on operational transparency and self-determination, we alter the production system to stop "pushing" work to employees but enabling them to "pull" work independently from a pool of work tasks. We find that the combination of increased transparency and autonomy improves workers' effectiveness and operational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of providing performance feedback to frontline workers that use new digital technologies in manufacturing. Our research setting is a globally operating manufacturer that uses smartwatches for real-time control on the shop floor. Using a large- scale and multi-site field experiment, we analyze 29.669 machine statuses and study the productivity effects of providing workers near real-time feedback on their performance via the smartwatch. We leverage construal-level theory and its central idea of psychological distance to develop our hypotheses. We first observe the production without feedback to establish comparability of our treatment groups and then allocate several combinations of different feedback to workers in two production plants. We vary whether the feedback addresses the individual worker or the entire work group and the message framing: the positive frame focuses on what tasks have been completed on the shop floor ("glass half full") whereas the negative frame focuses on those tasks that were left unfinished ("glass half empty"). Our findings suggest that positively framed feedback directed to individuals improves performance most, providing novel theoretical insights on the combination of feedback framing and their individual/team-level reference points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to front-line worker behavior when manufactures replace analog work methods with digitalized tools? Considering the current extent and speed of manufacturing and shop-floor digitalization, this important question remains under-represented. In this paper, we study the implementation of so-called "digital Shop Floor Management" (dSFM) systems in five advanced European manufacturing plants. Shop floor management refers to a collection of practices and routines implemented to monitor, steer, and improve production processes at the factory floor. Traditional shop floor management relies largely on lean principles that favor analog and on-site pen-and-paper methods. Seeking to make these processes more efficient, many manufactures are replacing analog methods with new digital dSFM technologies, such as digital dashboards, smart watches, and decision support systems using artificial intelligence. However, our observations give reason to believe that this transition is riddled with paradoxes that stem partly from incompatibilities between the intention of shop floor management and the capabilities of digital technologies. For example, we find evidence that digital technology - a measure that increases the autonomy of production workers - also paradoxically favors stricter control by management. We uncovered these trends in interviews among 30 managers and shop-floor workers of manufacturing companies located in central Europe and discuss our observations in light of paradox theory. Our main contribution is a behavioral paradox perspective on process improvement and digitalization of manufacturing processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insourcing as a means to countermand former outsourcing decisions is becoming a widespread practice nowadays, particularly in high-tech manufacturing industries. Researchers have focused on the underlying Operations & Supply Chain Management (OSCM) performance drivers (e.g., lead times, control costs, or responsiveness), while the behavioral aspects underlying insourcing decisions remain less empirically explored. We derive a model grounded in the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to study the effects of managers' internal and external drivers as well as their interaction on insourcing intentions and behavior. We test our hypotheses in a vignette-based experiment among 145 managers. We find support for the positive effects of attitude and mimetic pressure on insourcing intentions and several interaction effects, both on insourcing intentions and behavior. Our contextualization of motivational drivers provides new empirical insights into the behavioral aspects of insourcing decision making and suggests a theoretical integration between TPB and Institutional Theory in explaining individual decision making. As part of our results, we provide evidence of a unique boundary condition to TPB in the insourcing context, which allows deriving interesting avenues for future inquiry and recommendations for managers considering insourcing." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research builds on the established work on managers' respective functional goals in cross-functional teams (i.e., external motivation) and intersects this literature with the perspective of individual team members' psychological needs (i.e., internal motivation) in the context of organizational buying. We find that psychological needs significantly affect conflict in sourcing teams and interact with goal misalignment to influence both team consensus and final performance. Our study contributes to the growing behavioral literature on sourcing teams and to the scarce team-level motivation literature. Our findings provide guidance on how to compose sourcing teams in terms of their members' inherent needs to improve team decision outcomes under functional goal misalignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sourcing decisions are usually executed in teams of cross-functional specialists to improve decision outcomes via internal integration. However, internal functional specialists (e.g. from purchasing, logistics, R&D, operations and production management, or marketing) not only bring in diverse expertise but also diverse goals and functional incentive structures. We examine how the (mis)alignment of functional goals and the distribution of knowledge on who knows what (metaknowledge) affect political dynamics and the rationality of the decision process in cross-functional sourcing teams. Our hypotheses are grounded on an intra-firm perspective of resource dependency theory. To test our hypotheses, we developed a two-by-two vignette-based social team experiment. The teams consisted of purchasing, research & development and marketing & sales representatives. Based on a sample 87 teams, we find that misaligned goals trigger politics, which impedes rational decision making. Centralized metaknowledge (i.e., one well informed team member) leads to coordination benefits under goal alignment with positive implications for procedural rationality. Moreover, centralzed metaknowledge significantly amplifies politics under goal misalignment. This study contributes to recently sparking research on behavioral operations & supply chain management. Being among the first behavioral cross-functional sourcing team studies we provide theoretical and practical implications for the design of sourcing team integration processes from a organizational politics and group psychology perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern business decisions have become increasingly complex, making cross-functional integration an enabler but also a challenge for decision-making teams. Diverse functional priorities create open conflict and trigger covert political tactics. Yet, we know little about the connection between such conflict and organizational politics in decision-making teams. Therefore, we conduct a structured literature review to delineate the status of research and to connect these two literature streams more thoroughly in the future. In a thematic analysis of 134 publications, we identify 10 themes that represent ongoing discussions, debates, and trends within and between conflict and politics research. Our findings show that team conflict research is diverse and overall well-developed, while the team-focus is meaningful but scarce in research on organizational politics. Instead, politics studies focus on the individual within a departmental or firm context and study mostly individual-related phenomena, such as emotions or withdrawal. We map out how research on conflict and politics can enhance their mutual understanding and study the reciprocal effects on one another based on a concluding framework depicting existing knowledge on causes and effects of organizational politics, conflict and their interconnectedness. Our main contribution is a comprehension of the advances and uncovered spots in team conflict and politics literature, which is channeled into a selection of specific ideas for future inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]