Center for Organizational Research (COR)

Redesigning Work: Findings from the Work, Family, and Health Network and Implications for Gender Inequality

Friday, March 18
12:00-1:15pm
SSPB 4250

Erin L. Kelly
Professor, Work and Organization Studies and Institute for
Work and Employment Research
MIT Sloan School of Management

Professional, managerial, and technical employees often face expectations that they will put in long hours in the office and prioritize work over family and personal responsibilities. Flexible work arrangements seem to challenge those expectations and potentially reduce work-life conflicts (or improve ¡°balance¡±). But most work organizations grant flexibility to an individual employee after a request and negotiation with a supervisor. That system discourages some interested employees from seeking out flexible work practices because they fear working in these ways will bring negative career consequences; penalties for flexible work practices also contribute to gender inequality given cultural associations between women and family life. I will report on the Work, Family, and Health Network’s group-randomized field experiment evaluating a different approach (called STAR) to supporting employees’ personal and family lives and health. Longitudinal data from over 600 information technology (IT) employees in a U.S. Fortune 500 firm demonstrate positive effects of the STAR intervention on work-life conflicts, having ¡°enough time¡± for family, sleep duration and quality, and improvements in well-being for some subgroups of employees. Analyses also reveal that employees in STAR do not face career penalties, such as slower wage growth, when they have variable schedules or work at home but women in the control group do.

Socio-Technical Coordination: How Millions of People use Transparency to Collaborate on Millions of Interdependent Projects on GitHub

James Herbsleb
Professor in the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

Date: Friday, February 12, 2016
Talk: 3:00 PM
Location: 6011 Donald Bren Hall

Refreshments: 4:15 PM, to be served in the 5th floor lobby.

Abstract: Collectively creating digital things these days often means hordes of people collaborating in open, transparent environments, loosely organized in ecosystems of interdependent projects. Splitting work across such large collections of people has great potential benefits such as tapping a broader talent pool, enabling better matches between tasks and skills, and reducing schedule bottlenecks. But it also gives rise to very large scale coordination problems while inhibiting many familiar coordination practices, which rely on overarching hierarchies of authority. In this talk, I will develop a socio-technical theory of coordination, and show how colleagues and I empirically validated it in a geographically distributed software development organization. I will show how the theory can be adapted and enriched to help interpret the results our qualitative and quantitative studies of coordination practices in GitHub, an open, transparent work environment in which millions of people collaborate on millions of interdependent projects.

Bio: James Herbsleb is a Professor in the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he serves as Director of the PhD program in Societal Computing. His research interests lie primarily in the intersection of software engineering, computer-supported cooperative work, and socio-technical systems, focusing on such areas as geographically distributed development teams and large-scale open source development. He holds a PhD in psychology, and an MS in computer science. His research has won several Best Paper, Distinguished Paper, and Most Influential Paper awards, as well as the Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence. For no apparent reason, he also holds a Juris Doctor degree and is a member of the Michigan Bar Association. For about two decades, he has worked with assorted colleagues and minions to try to understand the complex and dynamic relationship between human collaboration and the software that the humans are designing and using. On his optimistic days, he feels he has made a bit of progress.

COR faculty workshop:
Miriam Bender (Program in Nursing Science)
Friday, February 5, 12:00-1:30pm in SBSG 1321.
Lunch will be provided.

“Using Callon’s Framing/Overflow Concepts to Understand Current Debates on Evidence-based Practice”

Martha Feldman (Social Ecology) and Gerardo Okhuysen (Merage) will serve as discussants.

Please see the paper abstract below. When you RSVP, we will send you the paper copy to read in advance of the workshop. Please RSVP by February 1.

Abstract: Evidence based practice (EBP) as an approach to health care decision-making emerged from an initiative first articulated by physicians in the 1970s. EBP developed as a reaction to documented heterogeneity of healthcare practices, which made it impossible to know which practices actually produced beneficial outcomes. Proponents of EBP believe scientific evidence generation is the best way to identify and measure the effectiveness of healthcare treatments and thereby build a solid knowledge base with which to deliver optimal healthcare. EBP is most popularly defined as the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients (Sackett et al, 1996). Evidence here is explicitly defined as findings from well-designed research studies. The EBP movement, or what some call an ideology, has been widely accepted by diverse healthcare disciplines. The Institute of Medicine has in fact challenged the United States to ensure 90% of all clinical decisions are evidence informed by 2020. This is proving quite problematic. Some relate the difficulties to the challenges of implementing evidence into practice, which involves additional elements such as context, patient preference and clinical expertise, and which are becoming an increasing focus of scientific examination. Others believe the assumptions inherent in EBP are themselves at issue. The debate continues with no apparent resolution and no significant progress towards the ultimate goal of improving health outcomes. Michel Callon, a sociologist, advanced the concepts of framing/overflow, which can help understand this state of affairs. In this article I explore current views of EBP and the achievements made possible by framing healthcare as EBP. I also explore what EBP framing does not acknowledge and therefore cannot achieve. This involves an examination of the overflows inherent in healthcare, and EBP, relating back to both identified EBP implementation challenges and current criticisms of EBP assumptions. I end with a discussion of what can be gained by considering the duality of framing and overflow in relation to healthcare delivery, and how this nonlinear approach might facilitate better care delivery as well as better health.