The Productivity Spectrum: An Individual-Level Examination of Servers’ Reactions to Workload and Overwork

Purpose: This study explores the diverse reactions of human servers to variations in workload and overwork, focusing on how these stressors influence service time in a call center setting.Study design/methodology/approach: OLS regressions with fixed effects and clustered standard errors were used to analyze the impact of workload and overwork on service time at both aggregate and individual levels.Sample and data: This research utilizes archival data from a call center at a large Kuwaiti private hospital, covering 58,460 calls handled by 23 agents during October 2016.Results: At the aggregate level, workload has a negative effect on service time, indicating a general speedup response, while overwork shows no significant effect. At the individual level, responses vary significantly among agents, with some agents speeding up, others slowing down, and some demonstrating non-linear responses to workload. Overwork responses also vary, with some agents slowing down, others speeding up, and some showing flat responses.Originality/value: This study contributes to the behavioral queuing literature by emphasizing the importance of individual-level analysis in understanding server responses to workload and overwork. The findings reveal that aggregate analyses can mask significant variations in individual behaviors, crucial for optimizing call center performance. By exposing the spectrum of individual reactions, the study provides deeper theoretical and practical insights into the complex dynamics of service time under different work stressors.Research limitations/implications: The findings provide insights for optimizing call center performance, but further research is needed to validate and generalize these findings across different settings and call center environments.