The Impact of Writing Direction on Order-Picking Performance: Evidence on Diversity and Efficiency in Operations Management

Language system diversity is a source of individual differences. Research on human cognition has established that writing direction influences non-linguistic mental schemata such as spatial orientation. However, there is little empirical evidence of its impact on task performance. We examine whether task performance in manual order-picking is higher when the in-aisle travel direction follows the writing direction of order pickers. We conducted this study in cooperation with a German brick-and-mortar grocery retailer, allowing us to employ a unique real-world data set comprising 3,200,534 storage-location visits by 113 order pickers, 61 of whom had a left-to-right and 52 a right-to-left writing direction. Our statistical analyses suggest that order-picking task performance improves when the in-aisle travel direction follows individual writing direction. This creates a path to diversity-inspired operations management that treats efficiency and the diversity and inclusion of human workers as equally important for optimization.

• 저널Production and Operations Management · 34(3) · 343–355
• 토픽Assembly Line Balancing Optimization · Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
• DOI10.1177/10591478241248750
• 저자Dominic Loske, Matthias Klumpp, Jelle de Vries, Andrea D. Bührmann, Julia Giese, Joachim Lübke