Rushing to Complete Work on Deadline Could Mean More Mistakes

What is it about?

How do deadlines affect work flows, task sorting and work quality? Deadlines are everywhere! They are a critical resource-allocation tool for managers, particularly in knowledge-intensive, high-wage sectors, who need to optimally manage the time of valuable human capital. But there are potential tradeoffs between speed and performance associated with such allocation. While increasing speed or limiting time allocated to specific tasks may increase the quantity of output and help better coordinate across tasks, the costs of doing so could include potentially poorer quality or reduced innovativeness of work due to increased time pressure. Notwithstanding their ubiquity in the corporate world, large-sample studies of the effects of deadlines in real-world settings have been limited.

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Why is it important?

Deadlines are used pervasively in all types of businesses to manage allocation of time resources and coordinate across different activities. Our work presents novel evidence for the effect of deadlines on job-flows, and is one of the first to quantify negative effects on work quality. Our results suggest that managers need to be vigilant about negative work quality effects of using deadlines, and careful about comparing any negative effects against work acceleration gains, to understand if their use of deadlines is indeed improving overall productivity (adjusting for work quality).