Purpose – To show that necessary condition hypotheses are important in operations management, and to present a consistent methodology for building and testing them. Necessary condition hypotheses (“X is necessary for Y”) express conditions that must be present in order to have a desired...

Purpose: This paper examines the claim that the application of human factors (HF) knowledge can improve both human well-being and operations system performance. Methodology: A systematic review was conducted using a general and two specialist databases to identify empirical studies addressing...

Managers usually associate ergonomics with occupational health and safety and related legislation, not with business performance. In many companies, these decision makers seem not to be positively motivated to apply ergonomics for reasons of improving health and safety. In order to strengthen...

In designing of production systems, economic and social goals can be combined, if ergonomics is integrated into the design process. More than 50 years of ergonomics research and practice have resulted in a large number of ergonomics standards for designing physical and organizational work...

A method for selecting and rating scientific and professional journals representing the discipline of ergonomics and human factors is proposed. The method is based upon the journal list, impact factors and citations provided by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), and the journal list...

Theory-testing with cases is ascertaining whether the empirical evidence in a case or in a sample of cases either supports or does not support the theory. There are two methodologies for theory-testing with cases, (a) testing in a single case (‘theory-testing single case study’), and (b)...

Pattern matching is comparing two patterns in order to determine whether they match (i.e., that they are the same) or do not match (i.e., that they differ). Pattern matching is the core procedure of theory-testing with cases. Testing consists of matching an “observed pattern” (a pattern of...

Theory-building with cases is (a) formulating new propositions that emerge from the empirical evidence in a sample of cases and (b) testing them in the same sample. The main difference with most other forms of generating new propositions (such as analyzing the theoretical literature,...

Replication is conducting a study in another case (or population) in order to assess whether a research finding from previous studies can be confirmed. The aim of replication is to assess the generalizability of a theoretical claim and the “research finding” that is (or is not) confirmed in...