Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A human resource allocation method for business processes using team faultlines

  • Published:
Applied Intelligence Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Equitable human resource allocation can maximize the efficiency of resources and optimize business performance. Despite numerous methods that have been suggested for solving the allocation problem, most of the existing methods focus on a single resource or task, and neglect the effects of team composition in business performance. In this paper, we introduce team faultlines to the human resource allocation problem. We first analyze resource characteristics from a demographic perspective and business process, then utilize the information value to select key characteristics and determine the corresponding weight. Second, we qualitatively identify team faultlines based on the clustering results of human resources and quantitatively measure the strength and distance of team faultlines. Multi-layer perceptron is utilized to build the base and ensemble performance prediction model. The allocation model and flow are designed subsequently. The reasonableness and effectiveness are evaluated with a real-world scenario, and the results show that our human resource allocation method using team faultlines can allocate human resources with high performance and optimize the business process.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. van der Aalst W (2011) Process mining. In: Process mining: discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes. Springer, Berlin, pp 7–11

  2. Andrejczuk E, Berger R, Rodriguez-Aguilar JA, Sierra C, Marín-Puchades V (2018) The composition and formation of effective teams: computer science meets organizational psychology. Knowl Eng Rev 33:e17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026988891800019X

  3. Antino M, Rico R, Thatcher S M B (2019) Structuring reality through the faultlines lens: The effects of structure, fairness, and status conflict on the activated faultlines–performance relationship. Acad Manag J 62 (5):1444–1470. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.0054

    Google Scholar 

  4. Arias M, Rojas E, Munoz-Gama J, Sepúlveda M (2016) A framework for recommending resource allocation based on process mining. In: Reichert M, Reijers HA (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42887-1. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 458–470

  5. Arias M, Munoz-Gama J, Sepúlveda M (2017) A multi-criteria approach for team recommendation. In: Dumas M, Fantinato M (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58457-7. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 384–396

  6. Arias M, Munoz-Gama J, Sepúlveda M (2018) Towards a taxonomy of human resource allocation criteria. In: Teniente E, weidlich M (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74030-0. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 475–483

  7. Bahargam S, Golshan B, Lappas T, Terzi E (2019) A team-formation algorithm for faultline minimization. Expert Syst Appl 119:441–455. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2018.10.046

    Google Scholar 

  8. Bahmani K, Semnani-Azad Z, Sycara K, Lewis M (2018) Team faultline measures: The effect of rescaling weights. In: Bui TX (ed) Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, ScholarSpace / AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2018.050, pp 379–387

  9. Bezrukova K, Jehn KA, Zanutto EL, Thatcher SMB (2008) Do workgroup faultlines help or hurt? a moderated model of faultlines, team identification, and group performance. Organ Sci 20(1):35–50. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1080.0379

    Google Scholar 

  10. Bouajaja S, Dridi N (2017) A survey on human resource allocation problem and its applications. Oper Res Int J 17(2):339–369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12351-016-0247-8

    Google Scholar 

  11. Cabanillas C, García JM, Resinas M, Ruiz D, Mendling J, Ruiz-Cortés A (2013) Priority-based human resource allocation in business processes. In: Basu S, Pautasso C, Zhang L, Fu X (eds) Service-oriented computing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45005-1. Springer, Berlin, pp 374–388

  12. Cabanillas C, Resinas M, Mendling J, Ruiz-cortés A (2015) Automated team selection and compliance checking in business processes. In: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Software and System Process, Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2785592.2785613. ICSSP, New York, pp 42–51

  13. Chen S, Wang D, Zhou Y, Chen Z, Wu D (2017) When too little or too much hurts: Evidence for a curvilinear relationship between team faultlines and performance. Asia Pac J Manag 34(4):931–950. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-017-9510-7

    Google Scholar 

  14. Choi JN, Sy T (2010) Group-level organizational citizenship behavior: Effects of demographic faultlines and conflict in small work groups. J Organ Behav 31(7):1032–1054. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.661

    Google Scholar 

  15. Conforti R, de Leoni M, La Rosa M, van der Aalst WMP, ter Hofstede AHM (2015) A recommendation system for predicting risks across multiple business process instances. Decis Support Syst 69:1–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2014.10.006

    Google Scholar 

  16. Cooper D, Patel PC, Thatcher SM (2013) It depends: Environmental context and the effects of faultlines on top management team performance. Organ Sci 25(2):633–652. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2013.0855

    Google Scholar 

  17. Erasmus J, Vanderfeesten I, Traganos K, Jie-A-Looi X, Kleingeld A, Grefen P (2018) A method to enable ability-based human resource allocation in business process management systems. In: Buchmann RA, Karagiannis D, Kirikova M (eds) The Practice of Enterprise Modeling. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02302-7. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 37–52

  18. Homan AC, van Knippenberg D, Van Kleef GA, De Dreu CKW (2007) Bridging faultlines by valuing diversity: Diversity beliefs, information elaboration, and performance in diverse work groups. J Appl Psychol 92(5):1189–1199. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.5.1189

    Google Scholar 

  19. Koschmider A, Yingbo L, Schuster T (2012) Role assignment in business process models. In: Daniel F, Barkaoui K, Dustdar S (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28108-2. Springer, Berlin, pp 37–49

  20. Lau DC, Murnighan JK (1998) Demographic diversity and faultlines: The compositional dynamics of organizational groups. Acad Manag Rev 23(2):325–340. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1998.533229

    Google Scholar 

  21. Lau DC, Murnighan JK (2005) Interactions within groups and subgroups: The effects of demographic faultlines. Acad Manag J 48(4):645–659. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2005.17843943

    Google Scholar 

  22. Le Q, Mikolov T (2014) Distributed representations of sentences and documents. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR, ICML’14, pp 1188–1196

  23. Li J, Hambrick DC (2005) Factional groups: a new vantage on demographic faultlines, conflict, and disintegration in work teams. Acad Manag J 48(5):794–813. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2005.18803923

    Google Scholar 

  24. Marrone JA (2010) Team boundary spanning: a multilevel review of past research and proposals for the future. J Manag 36(4):911–940. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309353945

    Google Scholar 

  25. Meyer B, Glenz A (2013) Team faultline measures: a computational comparison and a new approach to multiple subgroups. Organ Res Methods 16(3):393–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428113484970

    Google Scholar 

  26. Mutlu Ö , Polat O, Supciller AA (2013) An iterative genetic algorithm for the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem of type-ii. Comput Oper Res 40(1):418–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2012.07.010

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  27. Ren H, Gray B, Harrison DA (2014) Triggering faultline effects in teams: The importance of bridging friendship ties and breaching animosity ties. Organ Sci 26(2):390–404. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2014.0944

    Google Scholar 

  28. Richard OC, Wu J, Markoczy LA, Chung Y (2019) Top management team demographic-faultline strength and strategic change: What role does environmental dynamism play? Strat Manag J 40(6):987–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3009

    Google Scholar 

  29. Rupert J, Blomme RJ, Dragt MJ, Jehn K (2016) Being different, but close: How and when faultlines enhance team learning. Eur Manag Rev 13(4):275–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12083

    Google Scholar 

  30. Schönig S, Cabanillas C, Di Ciccio C, Jablonski S, Mendling J (2018) Mining team compositions for collaborative work in business processes. Softw Syst Model 17(2):675–693. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-016-0567-4

    Google Scholar 

  31. Siddiqi N (2017) Initial characteristic analysis. In: Intelligent credit scoring: Building and implementing better credit risk scorecards. 2nd edn. Wiley, New York, pp 179–200

  32. IEd S, Krohling RA (2018) A fuzzy sociometric approach to human resource allocation. In: 2018 IEEE International conference on fuzzy systems (FUZZ-IEEE). IEEE, pp 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1109/FUZZ-IEEE.2018.8491535

  33. Stroppi LJR, Chiotti O, Villarreal PD (2015) Defining the resource perspective in the development of processes-aware information systems. Inf Softw Technol 59:86–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2014.10.006

    Google Scholar 

  34. Swangnop S, Chaovalitwongse P (2014) A two-step tabu search heuristic for multi-period multi-site assignment problem with joint requirement of multiple resource types. Eng J 18(3):83–98. https://doi.org/10.4186/ej.2014.18.3.83

    Google Scholar 

  35. Thatcher SM, Jehn KA, Zanutto E (2003) Cracks in diversity research: The effects of diversity faultlines on conflict and performance. Group Decis Negot 12(3):217–241. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023325406946

    Google Scholar 

  36. Thatcher SMB, Patel PC (2012) Group faultlines: a review, integration, and guide to future research. J Manag 38(4):969–1009. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311426187

    Google Scholar 

  37. Van Knippenberg D, Dawson JF, West MA, Homan AC (2011) Diversity faultlines, shared objectives, and top management team performance. Hum Rel 64(3):307–336. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726710378384

    Google Scholar 

  38. Veltrop DB, Hermes N, Postma TJ, de Haan J (2015) A tale of two factions: Why and when factional demographic faultlines hurt board performance. Corp Gov Int Rev 23(2):145–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12098

    Google Scholar 

  39. West M (2012) Real teams work. In: Effective teamwork: Practical lessons from organizational research. 3rd edn. Wiley, New York, pp 27–31

  40. Yaghoubi M, Zahedi M (2016) Resource allocation using task similarity distance in business process management systems. In: 2016 2Nd international conference of signal processing and intelligent systems (ICSPIS). IEEE, pp 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSPIS.2016.7869851

  41. Zhao W, Liu H, Dai W, Ma J (2016) An entropy-based clustering ensemble method to support resource allocation in business process management. Knowl Inf Syst 48(2):305–330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-015-0879-7

    Google Scholar 

  42. Zhou ZH, Wu J, Tang W (2002) Ensembling neural networks: many could be better than all. Artif Intell 137(1-2):239–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0004-3702(02)00190-X

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China [grant number 61671157].

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, School of Software, Fudan University, No. 220 Handan Road, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Weidong Zhao, Shi Pu & Danni Jiang

Authors
  1. Weidong Zhao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Shi Pu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Danni Jiang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Weidong Zhao.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interests

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zhao, W., Pu, S. & Jiang, D. A human resource allocation method for business processes using team faultlines. Appl Intell 50, 2887–2900 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-020-01686-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-020-01686-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation