When a delay occurs in a project, there are basically two options: prescribing overtime work and injecting additional resources, in order to meet the project schedule of certain activities. This paper uses economic analysis to demonstrate that a decision maker will select the most suitable alternative by considering productivity losses in overtime work and the relative unit costs between differ...

Computer operators are at risk to develop health disorders related to prolonged computer use. We assessed the occupational risk factors for computer-related health disorders and evaluated health conditions of 939 Serbian computer operators. Musculoskeletal (55.8%), ocular (27.3%) and mental disorders (7.1%) were reported most frequently. Risk factors for health disorders, in both male and femal...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we consider the impact of uncertainty and real options on the decision of working time and examine the determinants of employment and hours in a stochastic framework. A numbe...

Research has demonstrated that information workers often manage several different computing devices in an effort to balance convenience, mobility, input efficiency, and content readability throughout their day. The high portability of the mobile phone has made it an increasingly valuable member of this ecosystem of devices. To understand how future technologies might better support productivity...

OBJECTIVES In the occupational health field, it is important to know how workload influences mental health. Overtime work and job strain appear to affect the mental health status of workers. Sense of coherence (SOC) may mediate the relationship between work stress and mental health. Since SOC represents a personal ability to manage psychological stressors, we hypothesized that a strong SOC woul...

The English author, whose most widely read works include the children’s series ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, seems to have recognized the danger of work more than half a century ago. Supporting evidence appears in the study of Virtanen et al. This is a study from the Whitehall II project examining the association between overtime work and incident coronary heart disease as assessed by the inciden...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this research was to evaluate the relationship between overtime work hours and CAVI, a new index of arterial stiffness. METHODS We measured CAVI of Japanese workers (3,862 men) aged 26 to 59 years. Simultaneously, we obtained information on their monthly overtime work hours for the past few months using a self-administered questionnaire, with responses divided into f...

The erosion of service quality throughout the economy is a frequent concern in the popular press. The American Customer Satisfaction Index for services fell in 2000 to 69.4%, down 5 percentage points from 1994. We hypothesize that the characteristics of services— inseparability, intangibility, and labor intensity—interact with management practices to bias service providers toward reducing the l...

Physicians' work schedules are an important determinant of their own wellbeing and that of their patients. This study considers whether allowing physicians control over their work hours ameliorates the effects of demanding work schedules. A questionnaire was completed by hospital physicians regarding their work hours (exposure to long shifts, short inter-shift intervals, weekend duties, night d...