Given the importance of experiencing fulfilling and productive workdays, scholars have focused on ways to boost employees’ daily engagement and performance, suggesting this may be accomplished by increasing meaningfulness of their work tasks. However, an alternative approach may be needed in multifaceted work contexts where employees need to complete sets of varied tasks each day, including tasks that lack meaningfulness. To address this issue, we integrate the workday design perspective with research on residual engagement to examine implications of strategically sequencing tasks in terms of their meaningfulness. We theorize that because of a process we refer to as engagement cascade, performing the day’s most highly meaningful tasks earlier and in a concentrated manner will tend to produce higher levels of daily engagement relative to sequences in which the most highly meaningful tasks occur later or are disbursed. We use agent-based modeling to formalize the engagement cascade process and generate specific predictions regarding how daily engagement is impacted by different task meaningfulness sequences. Findings from an intensive longitudinal design study with NASA and ROSCOSMOS crew members (Study 1), an experience sampling field experiment with full-time employees (Study 2), and two controlled laboratory experiments with undergraduates (Study 3 and Supplement to Study 3) provide support for our hypotheses. Specifically, the decreasing task meaningfulness sequence engendered higher levels of daily engagement, and in turn, daily performance, relative to increasing, inverted U-shaped, and U-shaped sequences.

Prior to COVID-19, female academics accounted for 45% of assistant professors, 37% of associate professors, and 21% of full professors in business schools (Morgan et al., 2021). The pandemic arguably widened this gender gap, but little systemic data exists to quantify it. Our study set out to answer two questions: (1) How much will the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the gender gap in U.S. business school tenured and tenure-track faculty? and (2) How much will institutional policies designed to help faculty members during the pandemic have affected this gender gap? We used agent-based modeling coupled with archival data to develop a simulation of the tenure process in business schools in the U.S. and tested how institutional interventions would affect this gender gap. Our simulations demonstrated that the gender gap in U.S. business schools was on track to close but would need further interventions to reach equality (50% females). In the long-term picture, COVID-19 had a small impact on the gender gap, as did dependent care assistance and tenure extensions (unless only women received tenure extensions). Changing performance evaluation methods to better value teaching and service activities and increasing the proportion of female new hires would help close the gender gap faster.

Disparities in access to primary health care have led to health disadvantages among Latinos and other non-White racial groups. To better identify and understand which policies are most likely to improve health care for Latinos, we examined differences in access to primary care between Latinos with proficient English language skills and Latinos with limited English proficiency (LEP) and estimated the extent of access to primary care providers (PCPs) among Latinos in the U.S.