All Articles By Date
There are 2015 articles published.
February 2012
Sharpening Your Skills: Online Marketing
| Published: | February 9, 2012 |
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| Feature: | Sharpening Your Skills |
| Forum: | open for comment; 0 Comments posted |
In this collection from our archives, Harvard Business School faculty discuss the latest research on online marketing techniques, including consumer reviews, video ads, loyalty programs, and coupon offerings.
Team Scaffolds: How Minimal In-Group Structures Support Fast-Paced Teaming
| Authors: | Melissa A. Valentine and Amy C. Edmondson |
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| Published: | February 8, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2012 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
It is increasingly necessary for 24/7 shift operations to include some component of team-based work. But how can organizations support such work among constantly changing groups of people in a setting where stable teams are not feasible? This research investigates an organizational structure the authors call team scaffolds: a role set with collective responsibility for accomplishing interdependent tasks. Studying the implementation of team scaffolding in a high-stakes setting, a city hospital emergency room, the authors observed that workers readily affiliated with the temporary teams—even without ongoing relationships—and worked together intensely during the short duration of these groupings, even developing a competitive dynamic with other team scaffolds. The role sets established job placeholders in an interdependent group so that people starting up a shift could take their places in the set and immediately understand the interdependence and accountability they shared with others. Overall, this design improved the ability and motivation of clinicians to engage in teaming.
First Look: February 7
| Published: | February 7, 2012 |
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| Feature: | First Look |
Evaluating market value of a high-flying social media IPO … Pressure and team performance … PerkinElmer expands in China.
Earnings Management from the Bottom Up: An Analysis of Managerial Incentives Below the CEO
| Authors: | Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Julie Wulf |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 7, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2012 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Many studies as well as anecdotes document a link between the structure of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation and various measures of earnings manipulation. In this paper, HBS professors Oberholzer-Gee and Wulf analyze all components of compensation packages for CEOs and for managers at lower levels in a large sample of firms over more than 10 years, between 1986 and 1999. Results suggest that the effects of incentive pay on earnings management vary considerably by both type of incentive pay and position. Overall, it appears that the primary focus of compensation committees on equity incentives for CEOs overlooks a critical component in curbing earnings manipulation. If one wanted to weaken incentive pay to get more truthful reporting, diluting bonuses-particularly that of the chief financial officer (CFO)-would be the place to start. This may be the first study to analyze the relationship between CEO, division manager, and CFO compensation and earnings management.
Kodak: A Parable of American Competitiveness
| Published: | February 6, 2012 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 15 Comments posted |
When American companies shift pieces of their operations overseas, they run the risk of moving the expertise, innovation, and new growth opportunities just out of their reach as well, explains HBS Professor Willy Shih, who served as president of Eastman Kodak's digital imaging business for several years.
Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries: The Impact of Task Decomposition and Knowledge Distribution on the Locus of Innovation
| Authors: | Karim R. Lakhani and Michael L. Tushman |
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| Published: | February 3, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2012 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Open innovation, enabled by low-cost communication and the decreased costs of memory and computation, has transformed markets and social relations. In contrast to firm-centered innovation, open innovation is radically decentralized, peer based, and includes intrinsic and pro-social motives. In this paper the authors use in-depth examples from Apple, NASA, and Lego to argue that in contexts of increasing modularity and decreased communication costs, open innovation will at least complement, if not increasingly substitute for, more traditional innovation modes. For this reason emerging theories of innovation, organizational design, and leadership for innovation must be informed by these contrasting innovation modes and the implications for governance, incentives, intellectual property, managerial choice, professional and organizational identity, and organizational cultures.
Once a Castle, Home is Now a Debtors' Prison
| Published: | February 2, 2012 |
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| Feature: | Op-Ed |
| Forum: | open for comment; 6 Comments posted |
Forget the notion of the home as "castle." Twenty-two percent of Americans owe more on their mortgages than the value of their homes. Nicolas P. Retsinas offers ideas for how these "debtors' prisons" can be turned into productive housing.
Is Support for Small Business Misplaced?
| Published: | February 1, 2012 |
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| Feature: | What Do YOU Think? |
| Forum: | open for comment; 25 Comments posted |
Forum Open Is support for small business overhyped as a panacea for our economic troubles? Recent research suggests the advantages of bigness when it comes to employment and economic development. If so, asks Professor Jim Heskett, what does this mean for government policy?
January 2012
First Look: Jan. 31
| Published: | January 31, 2012 |
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| Feature: | First Look |
The name game … Incentives to save … Squelching motivation
Observation Bias: The Impact of Demand Censoring on Newsvendor Level and Adjustment Behavior
| Author: | David F. Drake |
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| Published: | January 31, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
As the fundamental model for managing inventory under demand uncertainty, the newsvendor model has received significant research attention, but behavioral issues—the focus of this paper—have been less well studied. Nils Rudi and David Drake demonstrate how different aspects of the newsvendor model, a rather complex managerial decision setting, result in a combination of behavioral deviations from the normative solution prescribed within existing literature. The results can help managers prioritize order quantity improvements based on product margins and the degree of demand feedback available in the setting that they operate in.
Measuring the Efficacy of the World's Managers
| Published: | January 30, 2012 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 16 Comments posted |
Over the past seven years, Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun and a team of researchers have interviewed managers at some 10,000 organizations in 20 countries. The goal: to determine how and why management practices differ vastly in style and quality not only across nations, but also across various organizations and industries.
Discretion Within the Constraints of Opportunity: Gender Homophily and Structure in a Formal Organization
| Authors: | Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart, and Michael L. Tushman |
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| Published: | January 27, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Research has demonstrated that people associate most with others who are similar to themselves, including others of the same sex. What are the implications of such patterns for organizations? This study, written by Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart, and Michael L. Tushman, offers evidence of how and by whom formal lateral structures serve to link together an otherwise siloed organization. Analyzing millions of e-mail interactions among tens of thousands of employees of a single large firm, the researchers find that it is women more than men who tend to bridge formal structural boundaries in organizations. Thus women play a potentially valuable role in creating ties throughout an otherwise siloed multidivisional corporation. Despite the influence of a firm's formal organizational structure, people often have plenty of discretion to exercise choice. Same-sex interaction results from discretionary choice within the boundaries of the firm's opportunity structure. These results suggest (but do not prove) that same-sex interaction especially by woman can help to span formal organizational boundaries that are otherwise difficult to traverse. The findings raise questions for future research about whether conventional wisdoms regarding gender differences in social network structure remain accurate in current-day organizations.
Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty
| Authors: | Max H. Bazerman and Francesca Gino |
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| Published: | January 26, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2012 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
What makes even good people cross ethical boundaries? Society demands that business and professional schools address ethics, but the results have been disappointing. This paper argues that a behavioral approach to ethics is essential because it leads to understanding and explaining moral and immoral behavior in systematic ways. The authors first define business ethics and provide an admittedly biased history of the attempts of professional schools to address ethics as a subject of both teaching and research. They next briefly summarize the emergence of the field of behavioral ethics over the last two decades, and turn to recent research findings in behavioral ethics that could provide helpful directions for a social science perspective to ethics. These new findings on both intentional and unintentional unethical behavior can inform new courses on ethics as well as new research investigations. Such new directions can meet the demands of society more effectively than past attempts of professional schools. They can also produce a meaningful and significant change in the behavior of both business school students and professionals.
Who Lives in the C-Suite? Organizational Structure and the Division of Labor in Top Management
| Authors: | Maria Guadalupe, Hongyi Li, and Julie Wulf |
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| Published: | January 25, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2012 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The size of a CEO's executive team has increased dramatically in recent decades, but little has been known about its composition. Using a rich dataset of US firms from 1986 to 2006, this paper documents the dramatic increase in the number of functional managers in the executive team. The size of the team in these firms doubled over the time period from five to 10 positions, with approximately three-fourths of the increase attributable to functional managers (such as Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and so on) rather than general managers. The paper explores the drivers of these changes. Findings are critical for practitioners, and specifically CEOs, as they structure their executive teams and more generally as they make decisions to implement or execute strategy.
A Few Firms Have Outsized Influence in D.C.
| Published: | January 25, 2012 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 4 Comments posted |
New research by Harvard Business School Associate Professor William R. Kerr suggests the number of companies affecting government policy through lobbying may be smaller—but more powerful—than previously thought.
First Look: Jan. 24
| Published: | January 24, 2012 |
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| Feature: | First Look |
The economics of corruption … Learning the lingua franca of business … How a travel agency assesses risk.
What Do Development Banks Do? Evidence from Brazil, 2002-2009
| Authors: | Sergio G. Lazzarini, Aldo Musacchio, Rodrigo Bandeira-de-Mello, and Rosilene Marcon |
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| Published: | January 24, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Private firms in developed and developing markets find themselves competing with the so-called "national champions"—private and state-owned enterprises that receive entitlements, mostly trade protections and/or subsidized credit from the government. Most of these national champions get support by proposing long-term projects with large capital investment that would usually not be easy to fund using private capital. This paper, written by Research by Sergio G. Lazzarini, Aldo Musacchio, Rodrigo Bandeira-de-Mello, and Rosilene Marcon, uses evidence from Brazil to look at what happens to firm performance, investment, and financial expenditures when companies get subsidized credit from the Brazilian National Bank of Economic and Social Development, known as BNDES.
Break Your Addiction to Service Heroes
| Q&A with: | Frances X. Frei |
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| Published: | January 23, 2012 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 8 Comments posted |
In their new book, Uncommon Service, coauthors Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show it is possible for organizations to reduce costs while dramatically enhancing customer service. The key? Don't try to be good at everything. Interview and book excerpt from HBS Alumni Bulletin.
Income Inequality and Social Preferences for Redistribution and Compensation Differentials
| Author: | William R. Kerr |
|---|---|
| Published: | January 20, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Market-based factors have substantially increased inequality in the United States over the last three decades. If the inequality caused by these mechanisms reduces social preferences regarding distributive equality, the inequality can become amplified and entrenched. The potential thus exists for the formation of a "vicious cycle" where increases in disparity weaken concern for wage equality or redistribution. This weakened concern affords greater future compensation differentials, a shrinking of the welfare state, and so on that further increase inequality and again shift preferences. Alternatively, changes in social preferences can counteract inequality increases. William Kerr characterizes how changes in inequality affect social attitudes towards government-led redistribution and compensation differentials. The results of this study provide mixed evidence regarding the vicious-cycle hypothesis. Kerr's findings suggest that social preferences regarding inequality adjust to desire more redistribution while allowing greater labor market inequality.
Got Local Food?
| Authors: | Baris Ata, Deishin Lee, and Mustafa H. Tongarlak |
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| Published: | January 19, 2012 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2012 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
As consumers become more aware of the health and environmental implications of how food is grown and produced, demand for local food has increased considerably. This paper examines the operational tradeoffs in fresh produce supply to gain insights on what drives the structure of the supply chain and how "local food" can become a viable sourcing strategy for a large retailer. HBS professor Deishin Lee and coauthors show that there are complementary operational synergies when retailers and farmers increase scale and specialize. This implies that when small farmers are capacity constrained, they can be squeezed out of the supply chain. Technological advances in farming practices, efficiency gains in transportation, and space constraints in retail stores result in supply chain members mutually benefitting from their decision to increase scale, leading to specialization. The study characterizes the conditions under which vertical differentiation and operational scope can increase the viability of the small local farmer. This paper contributes to work on supply chain design and environmental sustainability.
Beyond Heroic Entrepreneurs
| Published: | January 18, 2012 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 7 Comments posted |
Research in progress by Harvard Business School's Julie Battilana and Matthew Lee reveals that a large number of social entrepreneurs are focused on local rather than global change, and on sustainable funding.
First Look: January 17
| Published: | January 17, 2012 |
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| Feature: | First Look |
The shrinking role of general manager … Studying bonuses for mid-level managers … What next for Yahoo?
