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Working remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant shifts and disruptions in the personal and work lives of millions of information workers and their teams. We examined how sleep patterns---an important component of mental and physical health---relates to teamwork. We used wearable sensing and daily questionnaires to examine sleep patterns, affect, and perceptions of teamwork in 71 information workers from 22 teams over a ten-week period. Participants reported delays in sleep onset and offset as well as longer sleep duration during the pandemic. A similar shift was found in work schedules, though total work hours did not change significantly. Surprisingly, we found that more sleep was negatively related to positive affect, perceptions of teamwork, and perceptions of team productivity. However, a greater misalignment in the sleep patterns of members in a team predicted positive affect and teamwork after accounting for individual differences in sleep preferences. A follow-up analysis of exit interviews with participants revealed team-working conventions and collaborative mindsets as prominent themes that might help explain some of the ways that misalignment in sleep can affect teamwork. We discuss implications of sleep and sleep misalignment in work-from-home contexts with an eye towards leveraging sleep data to facilitate remote teamwork.
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The Dual Effects of Team Contest Design on On-Demand Service Work Schedules
Emerging on-demand service platforms (OSPs) have recently embraced teamwork as a strategy for stimulating workers’ productivity and mediating temporal supply and demand imbalances. This research investigates the team contest scheme design problem considering work schedules. Introducing teams on OSPs creates a hierarchical single-leader multi-follower game. The leader (platform) establishes rewards and intrateam revenue-sharing rules for distributing workers’ payoffs. Each follower (team) competes with others by coordinating the schedules of its team members to maximize the total expected utility. The concurrence of interteam competition and intrateam coordination causes dual effects, which are captured by an equilibrium analysis of the followers’ game. To align the platform’s interest with workers’ heterogeneous working-time preferences, we propose a profit-maximizing contest scheme consisting of a winner’s reward and time-varying payments. A novel algorithm that combines Bayesian optimization, duality, and a penalty method solves the optimal scheme in the nonconvex equilibrium-constrained problem. Our results indicate that teamwork is a useful strategy with limitations. Under the proposed scheme, team contest always benefits workers. Intrateam coordination helps teams strategically mitigate the negative externalities caused by overcompetition among workers. For the platform, the optimal scheme can direct teams’ schedules toward more profitable market equilibria when workers have inaccurate perceptions of the market. History: This paper has been accepted for the Service Science Special Issue on Innovation in Transportation-Enabled Urban Services. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant FW-HTF-P 2222806]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2023.0320 .
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- Award ID(s):
- 1854684
- PAR ID:
- 10416457
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Service Science
- ISSN:
- 2164-3962
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2023.0320
