Download or read book Team Decision-making in the Operations Management Context written by Hioe Nico Laya and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the date, little is known about group dynamics in the operations management context, and particularly about team performance in inventory-management decision tasks such as the newsvendor problem. The latter, being a fundamental block of virtually any inventory/capacity management problem under uncertainty (e.g., strategic capacity planning, staffing policies, airline and hotel overbooking and cash flow management in banks) has proven a rather challenging decision-making task for individual decision-makers. The newsvendor problem depicts situations where decision-makers must place an order before one selling period starts. In this problem, decision-makers face stochastic demand and have to determine an order that can maximise the expected profit. Laboratory studies conducted by different researchers using different subject pools find that human decision-makers consistently fail to make decisions that maximise their monetary rewards (see Bolton & Katok, 2008; Bolton, Ockenfels, & Thonemann, 2012; Schweitzer & Cachon, 2000). The previous research addresses the problem in two ways. One direction is identifying decision-making biases (Bostian, Holt, & Smith, 2008; Srinagesh Gavirneni & Isen, 2009; Ren & Croson, 2013; Schweitzer & Cachon, 2000), and the other is identifying interventions that could help improve decision-making in this problem (Bolton & Katok, 2004; Bolton et al., 2012; Gavirneni & Xia, 2009). This study is an attempt to find an alternative that can help improve decision-making performances in the newsvendor problem by incorporating team decision-making. Despite the importance of teams in business, research on team decision-making in this problem is still scarce. In this study, we investigated the impact of factors peculiar to team decision-making, such as team structures, and heterogeneity of knowledge among team members. The novelty of this study is two-fold. Besides investigating the effect of team decision-making on newsvendor performances, this study also looks into the potential effect of knowledge transfers or learning in teams. The results of this study suggest that a structure in a team is significantly influential to the quality of learning in the newsvendor problem. While the participants from the flat team treatments consistently showed significant learning, the participants from the hierarchical team treatments seemed to perform the similar level of learning with those from the individual treatment. Moreover, team heterogeneity (in knowledge-specific domain) is also found to effectively increase the quality of learning in the newsvendor problem.