Preface for the Third Edition - Read

6. Organization 235
they will be working on mostly in the booking time frame. This means, that overlappings
are exclusively considered with respect to the preferred project. If there
are no project preferences, the following formula calculates project overlappings
po between project team members a and b:
po ab
psai bi ps
ai bi
= --------------------------- i P + ----------------------------
iP
2
psbi
psai i P
i P
ps ai is 0 if employee a is not on project i and is the project’s score if a is on
project i . ps ai^bi is the project’s score if employees a and b are on project i and 0
otherwise. Project overlappings are only considered if po ab > 0.6 because they are
only thought to be relevant if there are sufficient and sufficiently important projects
that employees share.
Theme overlappings. Similar to project overlappings, theme overlappings also
consider the relationship between two employees according to the themes that they
are working on. The assumption behind this is that employees working on similar
themes should be assigned to the same room in order to improve knowledge sharing.
Again, an employee can submit a theme preference, which in this case means
that they would like to sit in a room with a person that has a higher skill level with
respect to the preferred theme. In this case, overlappings are exclusively considered
with respect to the preferred theme. In all other cases, theme overlappings to
between employees a and b are calculated according to the following formula:
tha bi
th
a bi
toab =
i----------------------------- P + i------------------------------ P 2
thai thbi
i P
iP thai is 0 if employee a does not work on theme i and is 1 if a works on theme i .
th (a^b)i is 1 if employees a and b both work on theme i and 0 otherwise. Theme
overlappings are only considered if employees have an equal skill level or if a has a
lower and b a higher skill level, but not the other way round.
Group overlappings. Employees can submit a preference for a certain work
group. This means that they wish to work with other members of the preferred
work group. The corresponding score for work group overlappings wgo reflects the
number of employees in the assigned room that belong to the preferred work group.
Moving costs. The selected employees showed a strong preference for stability if
changes are not too significant. This is why fictive moving costs have been introduced,
so that small differences between criteria do not result in a large number of
moves between offices without much effect on the utility function. Moving costs
also consider room preferences that employees have submitted. Employees can
submit a preference for a type of room, e.g., a single office, a room with specific