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INTRODUCTION
Productivity improvement is a major concern for operations managers in today's economy. Shaw 1! recently reported that managers worldwide are actively seeking to enhance the productivity of their organizations and called for increased emphasis on productivity in the teaching of, and research directed towards, operations management. The need to enhance productivity is particularly crucial in service firms, for the service sector of the economy has consistently lagged behind the manufacturing sector in productivity growth since the end of the Second World War.
For service organizations, which are typically more labour-intensive than the goods producers, the key to better productivity is often sought through improvements in labour productivity. Service operations managers often attempt to improve labour-scheduling efficiency through the use of one or more types of scheduling flexibility. These scheduling flexibility types include, but are not limited to: staggered shift starting-times and overlapped shifts; shifts containing fewer than the usual eight hours of work; meal breaks and/or rest breaks which may occur within a "window" of time periods within a shift; weekly schedules which allow employees to begin work at dierent hours each day; weekly schedules which allow employees to work shifts of varying lengths each day; weekly schedules which contain fewer than the usual five days of work; and weekly schedules which provide for days-o which are not consecutive. The main advantage of scheduling flexibility is that it allows a closer match between the forecast labour requirements and the amount of labour which is actually scheduled As a simple example, onsider a small sesvice establishment which is open for business from 8.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. each day, five days a week. Assume that, in order to accommodate customer demand, one employee is required between the hours of 8.00 a.m. and noon; and two employees are required between noon and 4.00 p.m. each day. If no scheduling flexibility were permitted, two full-time employees would be scheduled. This establishment would thus incur four hours of excess labour each day. However, one full-time employee, and one part- time employee who works from noon until 4.00 p.m., would exactly meet the projected labour requirements without having any excess labour.
Segal 2! was one of the first researchers to note that, even with the inclusion of part-time employees...