alt Hacker NewsThis is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.
[Reads abstract]
They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?
Per abstract it's a "a dynamic difference-in-differences" analysis, which means likely that they see whether the employee behavior changes after the event. But establishing causation with it still requires quite a few assumptions.
PNAS is kinda known for headline grabbing research with at times a bit less rigorous methodology.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/04/breaking-p...
> Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.
If the results are true, it would be actually quite expensive because of the drop in productivity. It could also be a bit of a nightmare to push through ethical review.