An Example and a Proposal Concerning the Correlation of Worker Processing Times in Parallel Tasks

Models and understanding of line design depend on accurate assessments of the effects of design parameters on human actions. Although equity theory predicts that workers will react to the speed of people around them, experimental work has failed to find this effect in an industrial setting with parallel workstations or a change in coworkers. With the current research we contribute to the understanding of line design by using archival data from a manufacturing line. We show that workers do react to the speed of their coworkers, but that individual reactions vary widely. Because workers are different both in speed and reaction, managerial implications are not straightforward. We model an optimal and a heuristic rearrangement of workers and suggest a modified heuristic that performs well for increasing throughput. Our methodology combines empirical approaches, analytical modeling, and Monte Carlo simulation.