Volume Flexibility in Services: The Costs and Benefits of Flexible Labor Resources

Organizations can create volume flexibility-the ability to increase capacity up or down to meet demand for a single service-through the use of flexible labor resources (e.g., part-time and temporary workers, as compared to full-time workers). Although organizations are increasingly using these resou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Management science 2014-08, Vol.60 (8), p.1884-1906
Main Authors: Kesavan, Saravanan, Staats, Bradley R., Gilland, Wendell
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Bottlenecks
Cost benefit analysis
Costs
Customer services
demand spikes
Employee benefits
Employment
Financial performance
Flexibility
Human resources
Hypothesis
Insurance expenses
Labor
Labor market
labor mix
Linear regression
Management
Management science
Manufacturing
Operations management
P values
Part time employment
retail operations
Retail stores
Retailing industry
Sales forecasting
Seasons
Services
Stores
Studies
Temporary employment
Temporary labor
Terms of sale
U.S.A
volume flexibility
Workers
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Summary:Organizations can create volume flexibility-the ability to increase capacity up or down to meet demand for a single service-through the use of flexible labor resources (e.g., part-time and temporary workers, as compared to full-time workers). Although organizations are increasingly using these resources, the relationship between flexible labor resources and financial performance has not been examined empirically in the service setting. We use two years of archival data from 445 stores of a large retailer to study this relationship. We hypothesize and find that increasing the labor mix of temporary or part-time workers shows an inverted U-shaped relationship with sales and profit while temporary labor mix has a U-shaped relationship with expenses. Thus, although flexible labor resources can create volume flexibility for a firm along multiple dimensions, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.
ISSN:0025-1909
1526-5501
DOI:10.1287/mnsc.2013.1844