Samer Charbaji

Welcome to my personal website! You can find my CV here.

A little bit about myself:

I am currently finishing my PhD in Technology and Operations at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. In my research, I use novel experimental designs to study ways of improving knowledge worker productivity. In my first paper, I study how the design of enterprise social media platforms (a popular form of communication technology) affects knowledge worker helping behavior and productivity. My experimental design allows me to separately study the effectiveness of different design features that are often "bundled together" in real world platforms and to elicit the behavioral mechanisms driving effective design features. My work offers insight on design features that companies can consider implementing in their platforms.

Knowledge workers are often asked to generate creative output that involves elements of originality and usefulness. In my second paper, I explore how a knowledge worker's performance is affected by constraints placed on the usefulness of their creative output. Specifically, my experiment allows me study the effect that varying usefulness constraints has on the originality, usefulness, and the originality-usefulness tradeoff of a participant's creative output. I show that "artificially" lowering a desired constraint or even changing an employee's assigned goal can, in certain cases, help managers improve employee performance. In my third paper, I will be looking at how various forms of a manager's check-ins influence the way a knowledge worker switches between creative tasks and the effect that has on the employee's overall productivity.

I am a huge fantasy and sci-fi fan and, in my free time, you can find me catching up on the newest GoT or Lord of the Rings episodes or putting together puzzles from the Mandalorian.