The Impact of Writing Direction on Order-Picking Performance: Evidence on Diversity and Efficiency in Operations Management
研究德国零售商的实地数据发现，当订单拣选员的通道内行进方向与其书写方向一致时，拣选绩效更高，为兼顾效率与员工多样性的运营管理提供了证据。
Language system diversity is a source of individual differences. Research on human cognition has established that writing direction influences non-linguistic mental schemata such as spatial orientation. However, there is little empirical evidence of its impact on task performance. We examine whether task performance in manual order-picking is higher when the in-aisle travel direction follows the writing direction of order pickers. We conducted this study in cooperation with a German brick-and-mortar grocery retailer, allowing us to employ a unique real-world data set comprising 3,200,534 storage-location visits by 113 order pickers, 61 of whom had a left-to-right and 52 a right-to-left writing direction. Our statistical analyses suggest that order-picking task performance improves when the in-aisle travel direction follows individual writing direction. This creates a path to diversity-inspired operations management that treats efficiency and the diversity and inclusion of human workers as equally important for optimization.