Great Work
Poets Over Quants: Automation and AI Threats Increase the Value People Place on Creativity
Monica Gamez-Djokic, Adam Waytz & Maryam Kouchaki
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine how perceived automation and AI threats (the belief that advanced technology threatens humans' career prospects) shape workers' strategies for career preparation. In nine studies (N = 2,320; three preregistered), we find that perceived automation threat drives people to prioritize creative skills over technical and social skills. A pilot study revealed that people view creativity as less prone to automation and more likely to complement automation. Subsequent experiments confirmed that automation threat leads people to highlight creativity in job applications (Studies 1a-1c), leads STEM students and professional graphic designers to cultivate creative abilities (Studies 2a-2b), and increases jobseekers' interest in companies that champion creativity (Study 3). People value creative skills in response to the automation threat even when reminded of generative AI's ability for creativity (Studies 4a-4b). These results suggest that advanced technology steers individuals to prioritize creativity as a skill necessary to compete in the labor market.
Spaces for Creativity: Unconventional Workspaces and Divergent Thinking
Sunkee Lee & Manuel Sosa
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Companies are adopting unconventional workspaces -- often characterized by bright or oddly colored walls, unique light fixtures, unusual office furniture, vibrant artwork, the display of atypical non-work-related objects, and casual and playful atmospheres -- to foster creativity. Yet empirical evidence on the causal effect of such unconventional workspaces on creativity has been lacking. Across four experiments involving a total sample of 1,133 participants, we tested the effect of unconventional workspaces on individuals' divergent thinking: the process of generating many and distinct ideas to solve a given task. Contrary to our initial expectations, we found that unconventional workspaces did not always boost divergent thinking and even hindered it. Specifically, unconventional workspaces were harmful when solutions for a divergent task could be readily inspired by the workspace's features because of cognitive anchoring. Hence, the positive effect of unconventional workspaces was significant only when the potential solutions for the divergent-thinking task were unrelated to features of the workspace. These findings provide important evidence of the causal effects of unconventional workspaces on the process of creativity and highlight crucial boundary conditions for such effects.
How and for whom using generative AI affects creativity: A field experiment
Shuhua Sun et al.
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a theoretical perspective on how and for whom large language model (LLM) assistance influences creativity in the workplace. We propose that LLM assistance increases employees' creativity by providing cognitive job resources. Furthermore, we hypothesize that employees with high levels of metacognitive strategies -- who actively monitor and regulate their thinking to achieve goals and solve problems -- are more likely to leverage LLM assistance effectively to acquire cognitive job resources, thereby increasing creativity. Our hypotheses were supported by a field experiment, in which we randomly assigned employees in a technology consulting firm to either receive LLM assistance or not. The results are robust across both supervisor and external evaluator ratings of employee creativity. Our findings indicate that LLM assistance enhances employees' creativity by providing cognitive job resources, especially for employees with high (vs. low) levels of metacognitive strategies. Overall, our field experiment offers novel insights into the mediating and moderating mechanisms linking LLM assistance and employee creativity in the workplace.
Humans' Use of AI Assistance: The Effect of Loss Aversion on Willingness to Delegate Decisions
Jesse Bockstedt & Joseph Buckman
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
As artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become pervasive in business applications, so too have interactions between AI and humans in business processes and decision-making. A growing area of research has focused on human decision and task delegation to AI assistants. Simultaneously, extensive research on algorithm aversion -- humans' resistance to algorithm-based decision tools -- has demonstrated potential barriers and issues with AI applications in business. In this paper, we test a simple strategy for mitigating algorithm aversion in the context of AI task delegation. We show that simply changing the framing of decision tasks can allay algorithm aversion. Through multiple studies, we found that participants exhibited a strong preference for human assistance over AI assistance when they were rewarded for task performance (i.e., money was gained for good performance), even when the AI had been shown to outperform the human assistant on the task. Alternatively, when we reframed the task such that the participant experienced losses for poor performance (i.e., money was taken from their endowment for poor performance), the bias for preferring human assistance was removed. Under loss framing, participants delegated the decision task to human and AI assistants at similar rates. We demonstrate this finding across tasks at differing levels of complexity and at different incentive sizes. We also provide evidence that loss framing increases situational awareness, which drives the observed effects. Our results offer useful insights on reducing algorithm aversion that extend the literature and provide actionable suggestions for practitioners and managers.
Tapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home
Jose Maria Barrero et al.
NBER Working Paper, June 2025
Abstract:
Timely business-level measures of work from home (WFH) are scarce for the U.S. economy. We review prior survey-based efforts to quantify the incidence and character of WFH and describe new questions that we developed and fielded for the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS). Drawing on more than 150,000 firm-level responses to the BTOS, we obtain four main findings. First, nearly a third of businesses have employees who work from home, with tremendous variation across sectors. The share of businesses with WFH employees is nearly ten times larger in the Information sector than in Accommodation and Food Services. Second, employees work from home about 1 day per week, on average, and businesses expect similar WFH levels in five years. Third, feasibility aside, businesses' largest concern with WFH relates to productivity. Seven percent of businesses find that onsite work is more productive, while two percent find that WFH is more productive. Fourth, there is a low level of tracking and monitoring of WFH activities, with 70% of firms reporting they do not track employee days in the office and 75% reporting they do not monitor employees when they work from home. These lessons serve as a starting point for enhancing WFH-related content in the American Community Survey and other household surveys.
The growth and collapse of autonomy at work
Redzo Mujcic & Andrew Oswald
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 July 2025
Abstract:
Humans hate being monitored. Autonomy is prized -- including by research scientists. Yet little is known about a fundamental issue in the modern world: What is happening to job autonomy in today's workplaces as people move from youth on to middle age and then on to older ages? It would be natural to believe that individuals in the second half of their careers would be the senior ones with high autonomy. We provide evidence that such a belief is wrong. This study uses longitudinal data on hundreds of thousands of randomly sampled individuals, in three rich countries, who are followed through their working lives (n > 400,000). Workers' feelings of job autonomy trace out a smooth concave parabola, increasing up to midlife, until approximately the surprisingly early age of 40, and then collapsing over the ensuing twenty to 30 y of a person's working life. This is apparently not an illusion. We show that objective measures of autonomy -- signified by managerial and supervisory job titles, for example -- behave in a matching, hump-shaped way. As a further check, consistent qualitative evidence is given: a survey we ran asking managers about their experiences. We believe this paper's results represent a foundational, essentially unknown, and intrinsically cross-disciplinary puzzle.
The Performance Effects of Giving Front-Line Employees Direct Access to Performance Data and Thereby Limiting the Supervisor's Feedback-Intermediation Role: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Ethan Bernstein & Shelley Xin Li
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines how giving front-line employees direct access to their performance data affects performance. To explore that impact, we conducted a field experiment at a service organization that made employees' daily time-use analytics -- previously available only to supervisors -- simultaneously available to the employees themselves. We find, compared with the preintervention mean value, a significant treatment effect (an 11% decrease) in nonproductive time relative to the control group. That time, however, flows not strictly to productive (revenue-generating) activities but largely to the most convenient outlets, suggesting -- as supported by our qualitative evidence -- that data transparency on average shifted behavior more toward avoiding nonproductive activities than toward approaching productive activities. (As one participant observed, it led people to "conform, not excel.") We examine three relational factors we believed, based on prior feedback research, could moderate the performance effect: perceived supervisor support, social comparison orientation, and work motivation type. Performance improvements are greater for employees who perceived their supervisors as less supportive and for those with low intrinsic motivation or high extrinsic motivation; we fail to find a moderating effect of social comparison orientation. Therefore, although we identify the avoidance (although not approach) value of transparent performance data, our results also tell a nuanced story about the supervisor's optimal role in delivering feedback: The ability to shift people away from "bad" and toward other uses of time depends on the employee's perception of supervisor quality and the employee's motivation type.
The Effect of Basketball Analytics Investment on National Basketball Association (NBA) Team Performance
Henry Wang, Arnab Sarker & Anette Hosoi
Journal of Sports Economics, August 2025, Pages 668-688
Abstract:
In the National Basketball Association (NBA), basketball data and analytics is an area of significant financial investment for all 30 franchises, despite there being little quantitative evidence demonstrating analytics adoption actually improves team-level performance. This study seeks to measure the return on investment of analytics on NBA team success in a time of great demand for analytical front office personnel. Using a two-way fixed effects modeling approach, we identify the causal effect of analytics department headcounts on regular season wins using 12 years of season-level data for each team. We find a positive and statistically significant effect, suggesting clubs that invest more in analytics tend to outperform competitors when controlling for roster characteristics, injuries, difficulty of schedule, and team-specific and time-specific effects. This research contributes to the body of literature affirming the value of data analytics for organizational performance and supports current investments in analytics being made by NBA teams.
The effect of task switching on productivity: Evidence from Major League Baseball pitchers
Alex Farnell et al.
Oxford Economic Papers, July 2025, Pages 849-866
Abstract:
There are few opportunities, outside of a laboratory setting, to study how workers respond to the demands of task switching. A priori, task switching might either harm or benefit productivity, and thus it becomes an empirical question. Faced with difficulties in the measurement of productivity and task switching, we turn to an industry that produces accurate, detailed, and comparable measures of worker production, namely starting pitchers in Major League Baseball. Our results suggest that task switching, between pitching and batting, can improve subsequent pitching performance, though heterogeneity in this effect is present. We discuss implications for wider labour market settings.