The "dark-side" of customer oriented efficiency: injuries and illnesses in order fulfillment services
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Oh, Nawon
- Graduate Program:
- Business Administration (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 31, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Daniel DellaPosta, Outside Unit & Field Member
Brent Ambrose, Program Head/Chair
Tessa Recendes, Major Field Member
Vilmos Misangyi, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Forrest Briscoe, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- workplace safety
injuries and illnesses
fulfillment centers - Abstract:
- Although the workplace safety literature has primarily focused on internal factors of a firm that may influence organizational safety outcomes, recent studies have pointed to the need for a better understanding of how broader cultural and external environmental forces can affect workplace safety. My study extends this research by examining whether a firm’s relentless pursuit of efficiency aimed at customer satisfaction and order fulfillment—which I refer to as a customer-oriented efficiency logic (COE logic)—adversely affects workplace safety in the fulfillment center industries. I argue that the COE logic serves as a rationalizing mechanism (e.g., Ashforth & Anand, 2003), or an “institutionalized myth” (e.g., Amis, Mair, & Munir, 2020), that allows managers, employees, and even customers to accept, or even be complicit in, high numbers of workplace injuries and illnesses in these industries. I hypothesize that firms with a stronger COE logic have higher numbers of work-related injuries and illnesses than do their counterparts with a weaker COE logic. I also further investigate whether the political ideology of firms’ CEOs, and of the regions where their fulfillment centers are located, moderates the effect that the COE logic has on the number of injuries and illnesses companies experience. Based on the prior literature suggesting that individuals guided by a conservative ideology tend to have system-justifying beliefs, I argue that the COE logic has a stronger effect on those guided by a liberal ideology; the “siren song” of a COE logic has more of an opportunity to affect liberals as compared to conservatives, given that the latter already tend to rationalize incidents of injuries and illnesses among fulfillment center workers. My hypotheses are widely supported by analyses using establishment-level (i.e., fulfillment center) data on nonfatal occupational injuries from 2016 to 2020, obtained from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) database.