Can Employees’ Past Helping Behavior Be Used to Improve Shift Scheduling? Evidence from ICU Nurses
研究利用ICU护士的电子医疗记录，发现员工过去的助人行为（包括个人总助人量和成对助人量）能预测患者住院时长，且比团队熟悉度更有效，表明基于助人数据的排班有潜力改善运营效果。
Employees routinely make valuable contributions at work that are not part of their formal job description, such as helping a struggling coworker. These contributions, termed organizational citizenship behavior, are studied from many angles in the organizational behavior literature. However, the degree to which the past helping behavior of employees scheduled to a shift impacts that shift’s operational outcomes remains an underexplored question. We define two measures of past helping behavior for members of a shift—the total past helping of each employee and the past helping between each pair of employees—and hypothesize that they are associated with shift performance. We empirically confirm our hypotheses with detailed scheduling and patient outcome data from six intensive care units (ICUs) at a large academic medical center, using the hospital’s electronic medical records to identify cases of one nurse helping another. Our empirical results indicate that both measures of past helping are predictive of patient length of stay (LOS), more so than the broadly studied notion of team familiarity. Counterfactual analysis shows that relatively small changes in shift composition can yield significant reduction in total LOS, indicating the managerial significance of the results. Overall, our study suggests the potential value of shift scheduling using data on past helping behaviors, and this may have promise far beyond the selected application to ICU nursing. This paper was accepted by Elena Katok, operations management. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00465 .