Essays on the behavioral dimensions of visualization in operations management

This dissertation systematically explores the role of visualization in behavioral operations management through a series of four papers. In today’s world, where information, data, and algorithms are ubiquitous, visualization as a human-data interface is an essential tool for understanding, interacting with, and making valuable use of data. At the same time, recipients and users of visualizations for decision making, problem solving, or inferring actions are influenced by their own cognitive abilities, social environment, and emotions, which in combination may individually promote or mitigate desired behaviors and outcomes. Therefore, this thesis investigates the relationships of common behavioral mechanisms between information visualization and operational settings, and subsequently derives visualization-based interventions to improve the decision process and economic outcome for the operational system. A combination of literature review, framework development, case study design, and behavioral experiments is used to generate both theoretical and practical insights. First, the importance of visualization as an adaptive interface in Industry 5.0 is highlighted to integrate and enhance the individual human factor in modern manufacturing systems, facilitating understanding and reasoning. Second, visual means, behaviors, and performance outcomes are synthesized in an integrative framework for different operational contexts, suggesting further options for designing and testing visualization for targeted behavioral operations management. Third, a socio-technical systems perspective is adapted to the use of visual aids to uncover individual facilitators and detractors of task performance and their impact on the overall organizational context. Finally, the de-biasing power of dual coding and salience through visualization aligned with cognitive processing is demonstrated for inventory decisions. This dissertation contributes to the field by systematically synthesizing the effects of visualization on behavioral operations and providing guidance for research and development. It also extends the theory of information salience, such as framing, by integrating visualization as an additional important element, and demonstrates the possibilities of visualizations to override commonly observed behavioral deviations from rationality. Finally, the results of this work have practical implications for the design of decision aids with visualization in operations management, aiming to improve the integration of human reasoning and enable individual worker management.