Leadership & Management
386 Results
- 13 May 2013
- Research & Ideas
How to Spot a Liar
- 24 Apr 2013
- Research & Ideas
Who Sets Your Benchmarks?
- 22 Mar 2013
- Research & Ideas
Pulling Campbell’s Out of the Soup
- 04 Mar 2013
- Working Papers
The Dirty Laundry of Employee Award Programs: Evidence from the Field
Many scholars and practitioners in human resource management have recently argued that awards and other forms of on-the-job recognition provide a "free" way to motivate employees. But are there unintended, negative effects of such awards? In this paper, the authors simultaneously examine the costs and benefits of an attendance award program that was implemented in an industrial laundry plant. The award used in the study was effective in that it reduced the average rate of tardiness among employees. However, it also led to a host of potential spillover effects that the plant manager readily admits were not considered when designing the program, and that reduced overall plant productivity. Overall, findings demonstrate that an award program that appears to be effective may also induce unintended consequences severely reducing the net value of the program. These results highlight the impact such a program can have on the overall performance of the firm and suggest caution when designing and implementing such programs. Read More
- 17 Dec 2012
- Research & Ideas
Teaming in the Twenty-First Century
- 04 Dec 2012
- Research & Ideas
Book Excerpt: Harder Than I Thought
- 03 Dec 2012
- HBS Cases
HBS Cases: Against the Grain
Dealing with pervasive, institutionalized corruption is tough but not impossible. A new case study on Tanzania joins a series of cases in professor Karthik Ramanna's research that explore the deep-seated problems of corruption as well as multiple entrepreneurial paths to combat it. Open for comment; 7 Comments posted.
- 27 Nov 2012
- Working Papers
No Margin, No Mission? A Field Experiment on Incentives for Pro-Social Tasks
Organizations from large corporations to NGOs use a range of nonfinancial performance rewards to motivate their employees, and these rewards are highly valued. While theory has suggested mechanisms through which nonfinancial incentives can elicit employee effort, evidence on the mechanisms, and on their effectiveness relative to financial incentives, remains scarce. This paper helps to fill this gap by providing evidence from a collaboration with a public health organization based in Lusaka, Zambia, that recruits and trains hairdressers and barbers to sell condoms in their shops. This setting is representative of many health delivery programs in developing countries where embedded community agents are called upon to deliver services and products, but finding an effective way to motivate them remains a significant challenge. Findings show the effectiveness of financial and nonfinancial rewards for increasing sales of condoms. Agents who are offered nonfinancial rewards ("stars" in this setting) exert more effort than either those offered financial margins or those offered volunteer contracts. Read More
- 01 Nov 2012
- Research & Ideas
Book Excerpt: Judgment Calls
- 29 Oct 2012
- Research & Ideas
Are You Paying a Tip--or a Bribe?
- 25 Oct 2012
- Research & Ideas
Developing the Global Leader
- 14 Sep 2012
- Working Papers
What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises
Decades of research using a wide variety of detailed plant- and firm-level data has provided strong evidence of persistent performance differences among seemingly similar enterprises. But what causes these differences? In this paper, the chapter of a forthcoming book, Gibbons and Henderson focus on the role of "relational contracts" in sustaining persistent performance differences among seemingly similar enterprises. The paper provides evidence both that many important management practices rely on relational contracts, and that relational contracts can be hard to build and change. They explore a number of reasons that relational contracts may be difficult to build, exploring both "bad parameters" and "bad luck" and the difficulties inherent in communicating the full terms of an evolving contract. They suggest that this perspective opens up a rich field of research into the role that managers play in sustaining superior performance and explore a number of theoretical and empirical approaches that may prove fruitful in building further understanding. Read More
- 04 Sep 2012
- Working Papers
Level II Negotiations: Helping the Other Side Meet Its ‘Behind the Table’ Challenges
Many situations make it important to productively synchronize "internal" with "external" negotiations. In fact, much research to date has focused on how each side can best manage its internal opposition to agreements negotiated "at the table." Often implicit in this research is the view that each side's leadership is best positioned to manage its own internal conflicts. Traditionally, a negotiator does this by 1) pressing for deal terms that will meet its internal objections, and 2) effectively "selling" the agreement to its key constituencies. However, James Sebenius argues that to achieve your own goals in negotiation it is also vital to understand all the ways in which you can help the other side with the its "behind-the-table" barriers (and vice versa). Independent of any altruistic motives, helping them to solve "their internal negotiation problem" is often the best way to get them to say yes to an agreement that is in your interest. To do this, negotiators should explicitly probe the full set of the other party's interests including the other side's interest in dealing effectively with its internal, behind-the-table challenges and conflicts. This requires you to deeply probe the context in which they are enmeshed: the web of favorable and opposing constituencies as well as their relationships, perceptions, sensitivities, and substantive interests. By way of a number of challenging case examples, this paper details a number of ways to develop this fuller understanding and to act effectively on it. Read More
- 23 Aug 2012
- Working Papers
Field Evidence on Individual Behavior & Performance in Rank-Order Tournaments
Contests abound in everything from amateur and professional sports to arts, architecture, manual labor, and engineering. Just as large-scale online contest platforms that provide ongoing tournament-based work and compensation have emerged, large industrial companies increasingly use them as a complement to in-house research and development. What difference does increased competition make to individual participants? This paper analyzes data from algorithmic programming contests to shed light on the mechanisms that underlie changes in performance in reaction to increased competition. Three mechanisms may account for a performance decline: reduction in effort, increased risk taking, and deterioration in cognitive processing. The study also shows how the ability of competitors affects their reactions to increased competition. Overall, results suggest that a better understanding of behavioral responses in contests can aid both public policy and contest designers. Read More
- 23 Jul 2012
- Research & Ideas
Book Excerpt: ‘Talk, Inc.’
- 16 Jul 2012
- Research & Ideas
Book Excerpt: ‘The Strategist’
- 16 Jul 2012
- Research & Ideas
Are You a Strategist?
- 12 Jul 2012
- Working Papers
Negotiation Processes As Sources of (And Solutions To) Interorganizational Conflict
Negotiations are often conceptualized as a means of managing or resolving conflict. Yet just as the process of negotiation may be a solution to conflict in some cases, it may be a source of conflict in others. This paper examines how contextual features within organizations affect negotiation processes and outcomes, and how these processes in turn become a source of or solution to interorganizational conflict. The authors argue that principals, agents, and teams face different sets of constraints and opportunities in negotiations. It is thus important to understand the link between unfolding interactions (the subject of considerable negotiation process research) and more macro features of organizations, such as formalization of roles, culture, or party representation. Read More
- 10 Jul 2012
- Working Papers
Communicating Frames in Negotiations
Economists examining bargaining behavior and outcomes often disregard the complex role of communication, restrict interaction to offers and counteroffers, or study the mere presence of communication while ignoring or constraining its content. This paper asks: How and why does talk sometimes make bargaining more cooperative and other times make bargaining more competitive? The answer may depend on examining what is being communicated about the underlying purpose of the interaction. Kathleen L. McGinn and Markus Noth argue that the content of communication frames the bargaining situation and thus can help predict bargaining behavior and final agreements. Read More
- 09 Jul 2012
- Research & Ideas
The Unconscious Executive
- 25 Jun 2012
- Research & Ideas
Collaborating Across Cultures
- 04 Jun 2012
- Research & Ideas
The Business of Life
- 14 May 2012
- Research & Ideas
Breaking the Smartphone Addiction
- 10 May 2012
- Working Papers
The Flattened Firm—Not as Advertised
For decades, management consultants and the popular business press have urged large firms to flatten their hierarchies. Flattening (or delayering, as it is also known) typically refers to the elimination of layers in a firm's organizational hierarchy, and the broadening of managers' spans of control. While flattening is said to reduce costs, its alleged benefits flow primarily from changes in internal governance: by pushing decisions downward, firms not only enhance customer and market responsiveness, but also improve accountability and morale. But has flattening actually delivered on its promise and pushed decisions down to lower-level managers? In this paper, Julie Wulf shows that flattening actually can lead to exactly the opposite effects from what it promises to do. Wulf used a large-scale panel data set of reporting relationships, job descriptions, and compensation structures in a sample of over 300 large U.S. firms over roughly a 15-year period. This historical data analysis was complemented with exploratory interviews with executives (what CEOs say) and analysis of data on executive time use (what CEOs do). Results suggest that flattening transferred some decision rights from lower-level division managers to functional managers at the top. Flattening is also associated with increased CEO involvement with direct reports—the second level of top management—suggesting a more hands-on CEO at the pinnacle of the hierarchy. In sum, flattening at the top is a complex phenomenon that in the end looks more like centralization. Yet it is crucial to consider different types of decisions and activities and how they vary by level in the hierarchy. Read More
- 07 May 2012
- Research & Ideas
The Art of Haggling
- 25 Apr 2012
- Research & Ideas
The Importance of Teaming
- 28 Mar 2012
- Working Papers
When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint versus Separate Evaluation
Gender-based discrimination in hiring, promotion, and job assignments is difficult to overcome. This paper suggests a new intervention aimed at avoiding biased assessments: an "evaluation nudge," in which employees are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. While joint evaluation is common for most hiring decisions, especially at the lower levels, it is rarely used when job assignments and promotions are being considered. The research shows that a joint-evaluation mode succeeds in helping employers choose based on past performance, irrespective of an employee's gender and the implicit stereotypes the employer may hold. While it is not always feasible to bundle promotion decisions and explicitly compare candidates, the research suggests that, whenever possible, joint evaluation would increase both efficiency and equality. Findings have implications for organizations that want to decrease the likelihood that hiring, promotion, and job-assignment decisions will be based on irrelevant criteria triggered by stereotypes. Read More
- 15 Feb 2012
- Op-Ed
Occupy Wall Street Protestors Have a Point
- 15 Feb 2012
- Working Papers
Learning from My Success and From Others’ Failure: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery
The importance of failure in the learning process is well recognized. In organizations as work grows increasingly fragmented—more specialized and divided into smaller tasks—the role of individuals in organizational learning becomes more important. This paper examines how individuals learn directly from their own past experience, and indirectly from the past experience of others. Focusing on one particular performance outcome, the quality of surgeries, findings indicate that individuals learn the most from their own successes and the failures of others, possibly because in both cases they attribute the outcomes to internal rather than external factors. This research has implications for healthcare and organizations more generally. Research by KC Diwas, Bradley R. Staats, and Francesca Gino. Read More
- 08 Feb 2012
- Working Papers
Team Scaffolds: How Minimal In-Group Structures Support Fast-Paced Teaming
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. Read More
- 07 Feb 2012
- Working Papers
Earnings Management from the Bottom Up: An Analysis of Managerial Incentives Below the CEO
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. Read More
- 26 Jan 2012
- Working Papers
Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty
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. Read More
- 07 Dec 2011
- Research & Ideas
Are Creative People More Dishonest?
- 23 Nov 2011
- Working Papers
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
Economists have been paying increasing attention to the role that culture plays in a firm's overall performance. This paper focuses on how trust—a key cultural factor—affects firms' decision-making process, size, and productivity. Research was conducted by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Rafaella Sadun of the Harvard Business School, and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics. Read More
- 27 Oct 2011
- Research & Ideas
Horrible Boss Workarounds
- 07 Oct 2011
- Views on News
The Steve Jobs Legacy
- 22 Sep 2011
- Working Papers
Measuring Teamwork in Health Care Settings: A Review of Survey Instruments
It is critical to accurately assess teamwork in health-care organizations. About 60 percent of primary-care practices in the United States use team-based models to coordinate work across the broad spectrum of health professionals needed to deliver quality care; in many other countries the percentage is almost 100 percent. While the benefits of effective teamwork are substantial, effective teamwork is often lacking in these settings, with negative consequences for patients. To date, little has been known about the survey instruments available to measure teamwork. In this paper Valentine, Nembhard, and Edmondson report the results of their systematic review of survey instruments that have been used to measure teamwork in various contexts. Their research helps to identify existing teamwork scales that may be most useful in testing theoretical models. Read More
- 15 Sep 2011
- Research & Ideas
High Ambition Leadership
- 06 Sep 2011
- Research & Ideas
How Small Wins Unleash Creativity
- 21 Jul 2011
- Working Papers
Collaborating Across Cultures: Cultural Metacognition and Affect-Based Trust in Creative Collaboration
Creative solutions often are born when two unrelated ideas come together for the first time. That's more likely to happen when the collaborators come from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, thus diminishing the likelihood of redundant ideas. In this paper, via a series of studies, Roy Y.J. Chua, Michael W. Morris, and Shira Mor examine the factors that make intercultural creative collaboration happen. Read More
- 11 Jul 2011
- Research & Ideas
Non-competes Push Talent Away
- 07 Jul 2011
- What Do YOU Think?
So We Adapt. What’s the Downside?
- 06 Jul 2011
- Research & Ideas
Are You a Level-Six Leader?
- 27 Jun 2011
- Research & Ideas
Recovering from the Need to Achieve
- 06 Jun 2011
- Research & Ideas
Why Leaders Lose Their Way
- 03 Jun 2011
- Working Papers
Inducement Prizes and Innovation
Throughout recent history, many foundations have tried to induce innovation through competition, offering massive cash prizes to inventors who meet the challenge of creating world-changing inventions. For instance, in 1996 the X Prize Foundation offered $10 million to the first non-government organization to launch a reusable, suborbital manned spacecraft twice within two weeks. The prize was awarded in 2004 to a project financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The problem is that inventors cannot win these competitions if they cannot come up with funding to realize their inventions, and research and development costs often exceed the amount of the cash prize. So, does the incentive of an eventual prize really induce innovation? In this paper, Liam Brunt, Josh Lerner, and Tom Nicholas look to answer that question, using a data set of prizes awarded by the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) between 1839 and 1939. Read More
- 18 May 2011
- Working Papers
Embracing Paradox
CEOs are often innovation cheerleaders, hoping that new ventures will eventually help reshape the industry for the better. But in tough economic times, the other senior company executives often choose to ignore innovative ventures and focus instead on the traditional core business, which reliably generate cash flow. This leads to a situation in which the CEO turns into more of a broker than a leader—trying to negotiate deals between the heads of the core units and the new units. That's a recipe for failure, according to Michael L. Tushman, Wendy K. Smith, and Andy Binns, who argue that firms can thrive only if the whole senior management team can embrace the tensions between the new and the old. In this paper, they introduce three guiding principles to help executives grow their core businesses while still nurturing their new ones. Read More
- 10 May 2011
- Working Papers
The Impact of Forward-Looking Metrics on Employee Decision Making
In marketing, the use of the customer lifetime value (CLV) metric encourages a focus on long-term customer relationships over short-term sales. This paper examines a situation in which a European bank introduced CLV data to its customer-facing employees, while still maintaining the incentives linked to short-term profitability; the goal was to discover whether and how these employees would modify their mortgage sales decisions. Research was conducted by Pablo Casas-Arce of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and F. Asís Martínez-Jerez and V.G. Narayanan of Harvard Business School. Read More
- 05 May 2011
- What Do YOU Think?
How Ethical Can We Be?
- 28 Apr 2011
- Working Papers
When Smaller Menus are Better: Variability in Menu-Setting Ability and 401(k) Plans
Economists love menus, which can be used to help understand people's choices. For example, do we prefer more choices (larger menu) or fewer (shorter menu)? But the menu itself has to be pre-selected. Research by David Goldreich (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) and Hanna Halaburda (Harvard Business School) focuses on the menu setter's decisions about what to include, and how large a menu to construct in the context of 401(k) plan choices. Read More
- 19 Apr 2011
- Working Papers
Top Executive Background and Financial Reporting Choice: The Case of Goodwill Impairment
In the management literature, some theories hold that corporate actions and strategic choices can be partially predicted by knowing the functional background of executives. The authors provide evidence on how CEOs and CFOs who were former investment bankers, auditors, and private equity/venture capital executives managed decisions around goodwill impairments (essentially goodwill charge-offs)—a complex accounting choice involving a high degree of managerial discretion. Research by HBS professor Francois Brochet and doctoral candidate Kyle Welch. Read More
- 08 Apr 2011
- Working Papers
Delay as Agenda Setting
A common business (and life) practice involves delaying a decision in order to avoid immediate commitment. James J. Anton (Fuqua School of Business) and Dennis A. Yao (HBS) discuss ways in which delaying or, alternatively, speeding up commitment can be a valuable tactic, how these tactics influence the actions of other decision makers, and ways in which such actions affect other decisions. Changing the speed at which a decision is made affects how others allocate resources to influence how that and other decisions will eventually be made. The researchers identify two tactics associated with changing decision speed: "pinning" and "focusing." Read More
- 04 Apr 2011
- HBS Cases
Reinventing the National Geographic Society
- 01 Apr 2011
- Working Papers
When Power Makes Others Speechless: The Negative Impact of Leader Power on Team Performance
History has shown that possessing a great deal of power does not necessarily make someone a good leader. This paper explores the idea that power actually has a detrimental effect on leadership, especially with regard to how it affects open communication within a team. Research was conducted by Leigh Plunkett Tost of the University of Washington, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, and Richard P. Larrick of Duke University. Read More
- 31 Mar 2011
- Working Papers
What Do CEOs Do?
If time is money, as the old adage goes, then a CEO's schedule is especially important to a firm's financial success. This raises a fair question: What do CEOs do all day? To that end, researchers followed the activities of 94 CEOs in Italy over the course of a pre-specified week, enlisting the CEOs' personal assistants to track their bosses' activities with time-use diaries. Research was conducted by Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School, Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute, and Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat of the London School of Economics. Read More
- 30 Mar 2011
- Working Papers
Temptation at Work
Among the many distractions that keep office employees from their work, surfing the web is arguably the most irresistible time-waster of all. In order to deal with that problem, many companies either prohibit Internet use during working hours, or closely monitor employees' web activity. This means workers must wait until they get home to get their daily YouTube fix. But does forbidding this distraction actually increase productivity? In this paper, researchers find that the answer is no—and that delaying gratification actually has a negative impact on employee performance. Research was conducted by Alessandro Bucciol of the University of Verona and the University of Amsterdam, Daniel Houser of George Mason University, and Marco Piovesan, a research fellow at Harvard Business School. Read More
- 29 Mar 2011
- Working Papers
Risky Trust: How Multi-entity Teams Develop Trust in a High Risk Endeavor
Work that comes with high risk requires a great deal of trust among the individuals involved, whether it's the financial risk of producing a high-budget film or the personal safety risk of working in a war zone. In this paper, reporting on case study research on a high-risk, multimillion-dollar construction project, HBS doctoral candidate Faaiza Rashid and professor Amy C. Edmondson explore the concept of "risky trust," and examine how colleagues can learn to trust each other in the midst of high-risk work situations. Read More
- 16 Mar 2011
- Working Papers
Driven by Social Comparisons: How Feedback about Coworkers’ Effort Influences Individual Productivity
Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats explore how the valence (positive versus negative), type (direct versus indirect), and timing (one-shot versus persistent) of performance feedback affects an employee's job productivity. Specifically, through field experiments at a Japanese bank, they investigate the extent to which job performance is affected when employees learn where they stand relative to their coworkers. Read More
- 08 Mar 2011
- Working Papers
Memory Lane and Morality: How Childhood Memories Promote Prosocial Behavior
Little Damien from The Omen notwithstanding, we generally associate childhood with goodness, purity, and innocence. This paper investigates whether feelings of moral purity can be triggered by reminding adults of their childhoods, and whether this can help to induce kind and philanthropic behavior both in social settings and in the workplace. Research was conducted by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino and Sreedhari D. Desai of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Read More
- 16 Feb 2011
- Working Papers
Naivete and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts
In business and in life, it's important to strike a smart balance between naďveté and cynicism. Act too naďvely, and someone is bound to take advantage of you. Skew cynical, and you may miss out on new opportunities with good people. This paper discusses the decision errors inherent in leaning too far in either direction. Research was conducted by Chia-Jung Tsay, Lisa. L. Shu, and Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School. Read More
- 24 Jan 2011
- HBS Cases
Terror at the Taj
- 17 Jan 2011
- Research & Ideas
Being the Boss
- 04 Jan 2011
- Working Papers
The Learning Effects of Monitoring
It's a challenge that all good managers face: How do you strike the right balance between encouraging autonomy among your employees and mitigating the risk that they'll make bad decisions? Using both field and quantitative data from the MGM-Mirage Group, this paper discusses how management controls affect the learning rates of lower-level employees. Research, focusing on hotel casino hosts, was conducted by Dennis Campbell and Francisco de Asís Martinez-Jerez of Harvard Business School and Marc Epstein of Rice University. Read More
- 03 Dec 2010
- Working Papers
Creating Leaders: An Ontological Model
HBS professor emeritus Michael C. Jensen and coauthors have created an ontological approach to creating leaders in which leadership emerges through spontaneous and intuitive natural self-expression. Read More
- 19 Nov 2010
- Working Papers
Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans
Companies generally pay their sales staff with some combination of salary, commissions, and bonuses for meeting quotas-with sales force costs averaging about 10 percent of sales revenue in the United States. This paper aims to gain insight into the most effective way to design a compensation plan, concentrating on whether bonuses boost sales productivity and whether they should be awarded quarterly or annually. Research, focusing on the sales force of a large office supply company, was conducted by Harvard Business School professor Thomas Steenburgh and Doug J. Chung and K. Sudhir of the Yale School of Management. Read More
- 02 Nov 2010
- Working Papers
Making the Numbers? ‘Short Termism’ & the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster
Executives at public companies are always under pressure to "meet the numbers" each quarter, often so much so that they sacrifice long-term investments in order to make everything look rosy in the short term. In this paper, Harvard Business School professor Rebecca M. Henderson and Sloan School of Management professor Nelson P. Repenning set out to reconcile the apparently contradictory strategies of short-term results and long-term investments. Read More
- 28 Oct 2010
- Working Papers
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
At what point in the corporate food chain are big decisions made? It depends on technology, according to new research, which finds that information-based software will help to push decisions further down the corporate ladder, whereas communication technologies will push decisions up to the top. Research was conducted by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University; Assistant Professor Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School; and Luis Garicano and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics. Read More
- 27 Sep 2010
- Research & Ideas
Customer Experts Lose Influence When Teams are Pressured
Group dynamics can take a bad turn when a team feels heightened pressure from stakeholders. In this Q&A, HBS professor Heidi K. Gardner explains why performance pressure makes team members do what seems irrational: defer to high-status "generalist" experts while ignoring colleagues close to the client. Read More
- 22 Sep 2010
- Working Papers
The Task and Temporal Microstructure of Productivity: Evidence from Japanese Financial Services
Boredom and fatigue often hamper the productivity of workers whose jobs consist of repeating the same tasks. This paper explores ways in which companies can combat this problem, introducing the idea of the "restart effect" - a deliberate disruption that kindles productivity. Research, which focused on a loan-application processing line at a Japanese bank, was conducted by HBS professor Francesca Gino and Kenan-Flagler Business School assistant professor Bradley R. Staats. Read More
- 15 Sep 2010
- Working Papers
From Bench to Board: Gender Differences in University Scientists’ Participation in Commercial Science
Does gender affect whether a university scientist will be invited to work with for-profit companies? Indeed it does. A new paper finds that male professors receive more opportunities than their female counterparts to join scientific advisory boards and start new companies. Research, focusing on the biotechnology field, was conducted by Haas School of Business professor Waverly W. Ding, MIT Sloan professor Fiona Murray, and HBS professor Toby E. Stuart. Read More
- 07 Sep 2010
- Research & Ideas
Mindful Leadership: When East Meets West
Harvard Business School professor William George is fusing Western understanding about leadership with Eastern wisdom about the mind to develop leaders who are self-aware and self-compassionate. An interview about his recent Mindful Leadership conference taught with a Buddhist meditation master. Closed for comment; 33 Comments posted.
- 02 Sep 2010
- What Do YOU Think?
How Transparent Should Boards Be?
- 25 Aug 2010
- Working Papers
Managerial Practices That Promote Voice and Taking Charge among Frontline Workers
How can front-line workers be encouraged to speak up when they know how to improve an organization's operation processes? This question is particularly urgent in the US health- care industry, where problems occur often and consequences range from minor inconveniences to serious patient harm. In this paper, HBS doctoral student Julia Adler-Milstein, Harvard School of Public Health professor Sara Singer, and HBS professor Michael W. Toffel examine the effectiveness of organizational information campaigns and managerial role modeling in encouraging hospital staff to speak up when they encounter operational problems and, when speaking up, to propose solutions to hospital management. The researchers find that both mechanisms can lead employees to report problems and propose solutions, and that information campaigns are particularly effective in departments whose managers are less engaged in problem solving. Read More
- 09 Jul 2010
- Working Papers
The Limits of Nonprofit Impact: A Contingency Framework for Measuring Social Performance
The social sector is in the midst of a search for metrics of impact. Over the past 20 years, there has been an explosion in methodologies and tools for assessing social performance and impact, but with little systematic analysis and comparison across these approaches. In this paper, HBS professors Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan provide a synthesis of the current debates and, in so doing, offer a typology and contingency framework for measuring social performance. Their contingency approach suggests that—given the varied work, aims, and capacities of social sector organizations—some organizations should be measuring long-term impacts, while others should stick to measuring shorter-term results. The researchers provide a logic for determining which kinds of measures are appropriate, as driven by the goals of the organization and its operating model. Read More
- 19 May 2010
- Working Papers
The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective
How should the most appropriate employers and job candidates find each other? Newly minted economists typically send applications to an average of 80 potential employers, and as a result, many employers receive hundreds of applications. It is extremely time-consuming to sort through all the applications, and as the process unfolds, there is a risk of coordination failure, in which employers and candidates who would be well-suited do not manage to create a match. In this paper, HBS professors Peter A. Coles and Alvin E. Roth and colleagues provide an overview of the market for new PhD economists and describe new mechanisms to improve the matching process. They conclude by discussing the emergence of platforms for transmitting job market information, and other design issues that may arise in the market for new economists. Read More
- 13 May 2010
- Working Papers
Just Say No to Wall Street: Putting A Stop to the Earnings Game
Over the last decade, companies have struggled to meet analysts' expectations. Analysts have challenged the companies they covered to reach for unprecedented earnings growth, and executives have often acquiesced to analysts' increasingly unrealistic projections, adopting them as a basis for setting goals for their organizations. As Monitor Group cofounder Joseph Fuller and HBS professor emeritus Michael C. Jensen write, improving future relations between Main Street and Wall Street and putting an end to the destructive "earnings game" between analysts and executives will require a new approach to disclosure based on a few simple rules of engagement. (This article originally appeared in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance in the Winter 2002 issue.) Read More
- 10 May 2010
- Research & Ideas
What Top Scholars Say about Leadership
As a subject of scholarly inquiry, leadership—and who leaders are, what makes them tick, how they affect others—has been neglected for decades. The Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, edited by Harvard Business School's Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, brings together some of the best minds on this important subject. Q&A with Khurana, plus book excerpt. Read More
- 06 May 2010
- Working Papers
Introductory Reading For Being a Leader and The Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological Model
Effective leadership does not come from mere knowledge about what successful leaders do; or from trying to emulate the characteristics or styles of noteworthy leaders; or from trying to remember and follow the steps, tips, or techniques from books or coaching on leadership. And it certainly does not come from merely being in a leadership position or in a position of authority or having decision rights. This paper, the sixth of six pre-course reading assignments for an experimental leadership course developed by HBS professor emeritus Michael C. Jensen and coauthors, accompanies a course specifically designed to provide actionable access to being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as one's natural self-expression. Read More
- 03 May 2010
- Research & Ideas
What Is the Future of MBA Education?
Why get an MBA degree? Transformations in business and society make this question increasingly urgent for executives, business school deans, students, faculty, and the public. In a new book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, Harvard Business School's Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin, and Patrick G. Cullen suggest opportunities for innovation. Q&A with Datar and Garvin plus book excerpt. Read More
- 12 Apr 2010
- Research & Ideas
One Report: Better Strategy through Integrated Reporting
Stakeholders expect it. And smart companies are doing it: integrating their reporting of financial and nonfinancial performance in order to improve sustainable strategy. HBS senior lecturer Robert G. Eccles and coauthor Michael P. Krzus explain the benefits and value of the One Report method. Plus: book excerpt from One Report: Integrated Reporting for a Sustainable Strategy. Read More
- 29 Mar 2010
- Research & Ideas
Ruthlessly Realistic: How CEOs Must Overcome Denial
Even the best leaders can be in denial—about trouble inside the organization, about onrushing competitors, about changing consumer behavior. Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow looks at history and discusses how executives can acknowledge and deal with reality. Plus: Book excerpt. Read More
- 21 Jan 2010
- Working Papers
Going Through the Motions: An Empirical Test of Management Involvement in Process Improvement
How can managers better lead their organizations to improve work processes? Describing their study of hospitals over an 18-month period, HBS professor Anita L. Tucker and Harvard School of Public Health professor Sara J. Singer detail how and why managers' taking action was more effective than their communicating about actions taken. Findings suggest, first, that taking action on known problems in specific work areas on at least a quarterly basis may improve the organizational climate for improvement. Second, the study indicates that managers would be well advised to take action-preferably substantive and intense action-in response to frontline workers' communications about problems. Overall, the research provides insight for senior managers who want to improve their organization's climate for process improvement. Read More
- 14 Jan 2010
- Working Papers
Optimal Auction Design and Equilibrium Selection in Sponsored Search Auctions
Reserve prices may have an important impact on search advertising marketplaces. But the effect of reserve prices can be opaque, particularly because it is not always straightforward to compare "before" and "after" conditions. HBS professor Benjamin G. Edelman and Yahoo's Michael Schwarz use a pair of mathematical models to predict responses to reserve prices and understand which advertisers end up paying more. Read More
- 17 Dec 2009
- Working Papers
Integrity: Without It Nothing Works
"An individual is whole and complete when their word is whole and complete, and their word is whole and complete when they honour their word," says HBS professor Michael C. Jensen in this interview that appeared in Rotman: The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management, Fall 2009. Jensen (and his coauthors, Werner Erhard and Steve Zaffron) define and discuss integrity ("a state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, in perfect condition"); the workability that integrity creates for individuals, groups, organizations, and society; and its translation into organizational performance. He also discusses the costs of lacking integrity and the fallacy of using a cost/benefit analysis when deciding whether to honor your word. Read More
- 16 Dec 2009
- Working Papers
The End of Chimerica
For the better part of the past decade, the world economy has been dominated by a unique geoeconomic constellation that the authors call "Chimerica": a world economic order that combined Chinese export-led development with U.S. overconsumption on the basis of a financial marriage between the world's sole superpower and its most likely future rival. For China, the key attraction of the relationship was its potential to propel the Chinese economy forward by means of export-led growth. For the United States, Chimerica meant being able to consume more, save less, and still maintain low interest rates and a stable rate of investment. Yet, like many another marriage between a saver and a spender, Chimerica was not destined to last. In this paper, economic historians Niall Ferguson of HBS and Moritz Schularick of Freie Universität Berlin consider the problem of global imbalances and try to set events in a longer-term perspective. Read More
- 10 Dec 2009
- Working Papers
State Owned Entity Reform in Absence of Privatization: Reforming Indian National Laboratories and Role of Leadership
Is privatization necessary? In India and across emerging markets, state-owned entities (SOEs) continue to make up a large proportion of industrial sales, yet they lag behind private counterparts on performance measures. But SOEs may be able to significantly improve performance even in the absence of property rights, according to HBS doctoral candidate Prithwiraj Choudhury and professor Tarun Khanna. As they document, 42 Indian state-owned laboratories started from a base of negligible U.S. patents, yet in the period 1993-2006 (during which the Indian government launched an ambitious privatization program), the labs were granted more patents than all domestic private firms combined. The labs then licensed several of these patents to multinationals, and licensing revenue increased from 3 percent to 15 percent as a fraction of government budgetary support. Findings are relevant to firms and R&D entities around the world that depend on varying degrees of government budgetary support and government control, especially in emerging markets like India, where SOEs control up to one-third of all industrial activity. Read More
- 03 Dec 2009
- Working Papers
Walking the Talk in Multiparty Bargaining: An Experimental Investigation
Talk can unite, but it can also divide. In multiparty bargaining, communication can focus parties on a fair distribution of resources, but it can also focus parties on a competitive distribution of resources. As HBS professor Kathleen L. McGinn and coauthors Katherine L. Milkman and Markus Nöth show through experiments, at the onset of interaction the dominant logic in discussions—be it fairness or competition—strongly influences the equality of payoffs even in complex, full-information multiparty bargaining. Increases in the relative frequency of talk about fairness are associated with payoffs closer to an equal split. Talk about competitive reasoning has the opposite effect, driving payoffs away from an equal division, though these effects are less consistent than fairness talk effects. The researchers' results add critical insights to our understanding of the role of communication in multiparty bargaining. Read More
- 23 Nov 2009
- Research & Ideas
Management’s Role in Reforming Health Care
Health care managers are the missing link in debate over reform. Their skills and ideas are needed to sustain and improve upon multiple advances in the delivery of health care for the benefit of patients. An interview with HBS professor Richard M.J. Bohmer, MD, and an excerpt from his book Designing Care: Aligning the Nature and Management of Health Care. Read More
- 19 Nov 2009
- Working Papers
Management and the Financial Crisis (We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us )
We have spent the past year mired in a global financial crisis that few saw coming and that will plague us for years to come. Such crises are gut-wrenching. Collectively and individually, we search for causes and solutions. Too often, we look for quick fixes that do long‐term damage, or we put the equivalent of duct tape on obvious problems, missing the true root causes. HBS professor William A. Sahlman argues that the macroeconomic problems were the result of terrible microeconomic decisions. The root cause of bad decision‐making resides in the nexus of culture, incentives, control and measurement, accounting, and human capital. We now have a unique opportunity to force a review of all the players in the financial system, from individual consumers to politicians and regulators to management teams at financial services firms. Read More
- 16 Nov 2009
- Research & Ideas
The Times Captures History of American Business
"We are not the first to face what seem like overwhelming challenges," says HBS professor and business historian Nancy F. Koehn. A new volume edited and narrated by Koehn, The Story of American Business: From the Pages of The New York Times, presents more than a hundred timely articles from the 1850s to today. Q&A and book excerpt. Read More
- 09 Nov 2009
- Research & Ideas
Come Fly with Me: A History of Airline Leadership
A new book looks at the history of the U.S. aviation industry through the eyes of its entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders—men like Pan Am's Juan Trippe and Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher—each emerging at different stages of the industry's evolution from start-up to rebirth. Who comes next? An interview with coauthor Anthony J. Mayo. Read More
- 26 Oct 2009
- Executive Education
The New Deal: Negotiauctions
Whether negotiating to purchase a company or a house, dealmaking is becoming more complex. Harvard Business School professor Guhan Subramanian sees a new form arising, part negotiation, part auction. Call it the negotiauction. Here's how to play the game. Read More
- 21 Oct 2009
- HBS Business Summit
Transforming Giants
- 13 Oct 2009
- Research & Ideas
7 Lessons for Navigating the Storm
Leading in crisis requires a combination of skills and behaviors—personal and professional—that can be mastered, says HBS professor Bill George. A crisis, difficult as it is, also presents an opportunity to develop and grow. Q&A and excerpt from 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis. Read More
- 05 Oct 2009
- Research & Ideas
The Vanguard Corporation
In the book SuperCorp, Rosabeth Moss Kanter lays out a model for 21st-century companies that care as much about creating value for society as they do value for shareholders and employees. The best part: It pays to be good. Read More
- 24 Sep 2009
- Working Papers
“I read Playboy for the articles”: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences
We want others to find us good, fair, responsible and logical; and we place even more importance on thinking of ourselves this way. Therefore, when people behave in ways that might appear selfish, prejudiced, or perverted, they tend to engage a host of strategies designed to justify questionable behavior with rational excuses: "I hired my son because he's more qualified." "I promoted Ashley because she does a better job than Aisha." Or, "I read Playboy for the articles." In this chapter from a forthcoming book, HBS doctoral student Zoë Chance and professor Michael I. Norton describe various means of coping with one's own questionable behavior: through preemptive actions and concurrent strategies for re-framing uncomfortable situations, forgoing decisions, and forgetting those decisions altogether. Read More
- 24 Aug 2009
- Research & Ideas
SuperCorp: Values as Guidance System
- 20 Aug 2009
- Working Papers
A Decision-Making Perspective to Negotiation: A Review of the Past and a Look into the Future
The art and science of negotiation has evolved greatly over the past three decades, thanks to advances in the social sciences in collaboration with other disciplines and in tandem with the practical application of new ideas. In this paper, HBS doctoral student Chia-Jung Tsay and professor Max H. Bazerman review the recent past and highlight promising trends for the future of negotiation research. In the early 1980s, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a hot spot on the negotiations front, as scholars from different disciplines began interacting in the exploration of exciting new concepts. The field took a big leap forward with the creation of the Program on Negotiation, an interdisciplinary, multicollege research center based at Harvard University. At the same time, Roger Fisher and William Ury's popular book Getting to Yes (1981) had a pronounced impact on how practitioners think about negotiations. On a more scholarly front, a related, yet profoundly different change began with the publication of HBS professor emeritus Howard Raiffa's book The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982), which for years to come transformed how researchers would think about and conduct empirical research. Read More
- 13 Aug 2009
- Working Papers
In Favor of Clear Thinking: Incorporating Moral Rules into a Wise Cost-Benefit Analysis
Policy decisions may be the most important set of decisions we make as a society. In this realm, moral rules often play an active and dysfunctional role. The typical way in which we make decisions—by weighing them individually—leads us to overuse moral rules in a manner that is inconsistent with the more reflective set of preferences we would identify through joint consideration of options. In their response to a companion article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Max Bazerman, of HBS, and Joshua D. Greene, of Harvard University, argue that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is unfairly stereotyped. The critique of CBA in the companion article could be better framed as a set of considerations that can contribute to more careful CBAs. Read More
- 10 Aug 2009
- Research & Ideas
High Commitment, High Performance Management
High commitment, high performance organizations such as Southwest Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, McKinsey, and Toyota effectively manage three paradoxical goals, says HBS professor Michael Beer. His new book explains what all companies can learn. Q&A Read More
- 05 Aug 2009
- Working Papers
Authority versus Persuasion
In directing employees, managers often face a choice between invoking authority and persuasion. In particular, since a firm's formal and relational contracts and its culture and norms are quite rigid in the short term, a manager who needs to prevent an employee from undertaking the wrong action has the choice of either trying to persuade the employee or relying on interpersonal authority. In choosing between persuasion and authority the manager makes a cost-benefit trade-off. This paper studies that trade-off, focusing in particular on conflicts that originate in open disagreement. Read More
- 29 Jul 2009
- Working Papers
Firsthand Experience and the Subsequent Role of Reflected Knowledge in Cultivating Trust in Global Collaboration
How can workers better collaborate across vast geographical distances? Distributed collaboration—in which employees work with, and meaningfully depend on, distant colleagues on a day-to-day basis—allows firms to leverage their intellectual capital, enhance work unit performance, face ever-changing customer demands more fluidly, and gain competitive advantage in a dynamic marketplace. Research over the last decade, however, has provided mounting evidence that while global collaboration is a necessary strategic choice for an ever-increasing number of organizations, socio-demographic, contextual, and temporal barriers engender many interpersonal challenges for distant coworkers and are likely to adversely affect trust between and among workers across sites. In this paper that examines employee relations at a multinational organization, HBS professor Tsedal Beyene and MIT Sloan School of Management professor Mark Mortensen find that firsthand experience in global collaborations is a crucial means of engendering trust from shared knowledge among coworkers. Their findings reinforce the important role of others' perceptions in our own self-definition, and suggest a means of addressing some of the problems that arise in cross-cultural global collaborations. Read More
- 09 Jul 2009
- Working Papers
Performance Pressure as a Double-Edged Sword: Enhancing Team Motivation While Undermining the Use of Team Knowledge
Why do teams often fail to use their knowledge resources effectively even after they have correctly identified the experts among them? Project teams are a prominent feature of the knowledge-based economy, and member expertise has long been recognized as an important resource that can greatly affect team performance, but only to the extent that it is accurately recognized and used to accomplish the objective. The step between recognizing others' expertise and then actually applying it to achieve a collective outcome, however, is highly problematic: Even when individuals know who holds relevant task expertise, they are often unwilling or unable to give the experts appropriate influence over the group process and outcomes. HBS professor Heidi K. Gardner takes a multidisciplinary approach to develop theory explaining how interpersonal dynamics in teams affect members' use of each other's distinct knowledge, ultimately leading to differential performance outcomes. Read More
- 06 Jul 2009
- Research & Ideas
Conducting Layoffs: ’Necessary Evils’ at Work
"The core challenge for everyone who performs necessary evils comes from having to do two seemingly contradictory things at once: be compassionate and be direct," say Joshua D. Margolis of Harvard Business School and Andrew L. Molinsky of Brandeis University International Business School. Their research sheds light on best practices—typically overlooked—for the well-being of those who carry out these emotionally difficult tasks. Q&A Read More
- 24 Jun 2009
- Working Papers
Don’t Just Survive—Thrive: Leading Innovation in Good Times and Bad
The financial crisis provides a sobering reminder of what happens when innovation fails to drive productive economic growth. For over a decade, money from around the world poured into the United States seeking innovation. Despite these massive investments, when adjusted for inflation, U.S. GDP grew slowly with much of the growth coming from government, professional, and business services, including real estate and outsourcing. What's more, inflation adjusted wages stalled for many, even as consumer spending increased. This paper argues that innovation is not a side business to a real business: rather, innovation is the foundation of a successful business. Read More
- 17 Jun 2009
- Working Papers
Innovation Communication in Multicultural Networks: Deficits in Inter-cultural Capability and Affect-based Trust as Barriers to New Idea Sharing in Inter-Cultural Relationships
What makes sharing new ideas across cultural lines so difficult? Given that disclosing new ideas makes one person vulnerable to the other, innovation communication requires trust. The literature on workplace relationships distinguishes affect-based trust—feelings of socio-emotional bond with the other—and cognition-based trust—judgments of the other's reliability and competence. Recent organizational psychology research on capabilities needed to work across cultures has also identified affect-relevant strengths such as confidence and nonverbal communication. HBS professor Roy Y.J. Chua and Columbia Business School professor Michael W. Morris survey a sample of business executives with diverse professional networks, assessing their inter-cultural capability and measuring both kinds of trust as well as idea sharing in their working relationships. Read More
- 15 Jun 2009
- Op-Ed
GM: What Went Wrong and What’s Next
- 11 May 2009
- Research & Ideas
The IT Leader’s Hero Quest
Think you could be CIO? Jim Barton is a savvy manager but an IT newbie when he's promoted into the hot seat as chief information officer in The Adventures of an IT Leader, a novel by HBS professors Robert D. Austin and Richard L. Nolan and coauthor Shannon O'Donnell. Can Barton navigate his strange new world quickly enough? Q&A with the authors, and book excerpt. Read More
- 27 Apr 2009
- Research & Ideas
Building Businesses in Turbulent Times
An economic crisis is a charter for business leaders to rewrite and rethink how they do business, says Harvard Business School professor Lynda M. Applegate. The key: Don't think retrenchment; think growth. Read More
- 24 Apr 2009
- Working Papers
Corporate Social Entrepreneurship
Accelerated organizational transformation faces a host of obstacles well-documented in the change management literature. Because corporate social entrepreneurship (CSE) expands the core purpose of corporations and their organizational values, it constitutes fundamental change that can be particularly threatening and resisted. Furthermore, it pushes the corporation's actions more broadly and deeply into the area of social value creation where the firm's experiences and skill sets are less developed. The disruptive social innovations intrinsic to the CSE approach amplify this zone of discomfort. Fortunately, the experiences of innovative companies such as Timberland and Starbucks show how these challenges may be overcome. Read More
- 02 Apr 2009
- Working Papers
The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization
Corporate hierarchies are becoming flatter: Spans of control have broadened, and the number of levels within firms has declined. But why? Maria Guadalupe of Columbia University and HBS professor Julie M. Wulf investigate how increased competition in product markets—and, in particular, product market competition resulting from trade liberalization—may be fundamentally altering how decisions are being made. Guadalupe and Wulf also shed light on the possible reasons behind certain organizational choices and on the importance of communication and decision-making processes inside firms. Read More
- 30 Mar 2009
- Research & Ideas
Professional Networks in China and America
While American managers prefer to separate work and personal relationships, Chinese counterparts are much more likely to intermingle the two. One result: Doing business in China takes lots of time, says HBS professor Roy Y.J. Chua. Read More
- 19 Mar 2009
- Working Papers
Beyond Gender and Negotiation to Gendered Negotiations
How does gender affect negotiations within organizations or rather how do organizations affect gender relations? Deborah Kolb, a professor at Simmons College School of Management, and HBS professor Kathleen McGinn explore how definitions of work, specified roles in organizations, status hierarchies, and the politics and practices of organizational realities affect how gender plays out in organizations. Considering gender in organizations from a "negotiated order perspective"—that is, from the perspective that cultural patterns and work practices are the result of past interaction and negotiation—not only expands the range of issues that are potentially negotiable, it also turns attention to rethinking certain dimensions of the negotiation process itself. Read More
- 02 Mar 2009
- Research & Ideas
When Goal Setting Goes Bad
If you ever wondered about the real value of goal setting in your organization, join the club. Despite the mantra that goals are good, the process of setting beneficial goals is harder than it looks. New research by HBS professor Max H. Bazerman and colleagues explores the hidden cost when stretch goals are misguided. Read More
- 17 Feb 2009
- Research & Ideas
What’s Good about Quiet Rule-Breaking
If your company quietly allows employees to break some rules with the tacit approval of management, that's a moral gray zone. And your company is not alone. When rules are broken but privileges are not abused, such unspoken pacts between workers and management can allow both to achieve their respective goals of expressing professional identity and sustaining efforts in positive ways, says HBS professor Michel Anteby. Q&A Read More
- 11 Feb 2009
- Working Papers
Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting
For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild." Read More
- 09 Feb 2009
- Research & Ideas
Uncompromising Leadership in Tough Times
As companies batten down the hatches, we need leaders who do not compromise on standards and values that are essential in flush times. Fortunately, such leaders do exist. Their insights can help other organizations weather the current crisis, says HBS professor Michael Beer. Q&A. Read More
- 26 Jan 2009
- Working Papers
The Decentering of the Global Firm
Firms such as Caterpillar are typically considered American companies by virtue of history while Honda, for example, is regarded as a Japanese company. However, the archetypal multinational firm with a particular national identity and a corporate headquarters fixed in one country is becoming obsolete as firms continue to maximize the opportunities created by global markets. The defining characteristics of what makes a firm belong to a country—where it is incorporated, where it is listed, the nationality of its investor base, the location of its headquarters functions—are no longer bound to one country. Why are these changes taking place, and what are their consequences? This paper places the increasing mobility of corporate identities within the broader setting of transformations to the "shape" of global firms over the last half century. Read More
- 17 Nov 2008
- Research & Ideas
Decoding the Artful Sidestep
Do you notice when someone changes the subject after you ask them a question? If you don't always notice or even mind such conversational transformations, you're not alone. New research by Todd Rogers and Harvard Business School professor Michael I. Norton explores the common occurrence of "conversational blindness." Q&A with Rogers. Read More
- 12 Nov 2008
- Research & Ideas
The Marketing of a President
- 22 Oct 2008
- Working Papers
Variation in Experience and Team Familiarity: Addressing the Knowledge Acquisition-Application Problem
Team familiarity helps team members successfully locate knowledge within a group, share the knowledge they possess, and respond to the knowledge of others. While team familiarity may help all teams to better coordinate their actions, it may play a particularly important role for teams with individuals looking to apply knowledge from their varied experience. This possibility leads to the question that provides the foundation for this paper: Does team familiarity moderate the relationship between variation in experience and performance? Prior research attempting to link variation in experience and performance has found effects ranging from positive to neutral to negative. Huckman and Staats explain these differential results by drawing on related work from learning, knowledge management, and social networking. Read More
- 16 Oct 2008
- Working Papers
Making the Gambler’s Fallacy Disappear: The Role of Experience
The Gambler's Fallacy refers to the belief that chance is a self correcting process. The longer the random run of one outcome, the stronger the belief that the opposite outcome is due to appear. This paper asks whether the way we acquire information, by sequential experience or by simultaneous description, plays a critical role in the emergence of the bias in a binary prediction task (betting on red or black roulette outcomes, for example). The results show that the fallacy only occurs when decision makers experience outcomes over time and not when past outcomes are revealed all at once. The question is interesting since several recent papers on decisions from experience and descriptions suggest that the way people acquire information can have a significant effect on behavior. Read More
- 08 Oct 2008
- Research & Ideas
Book Excerpt: A Sense of Urgency
- 28 Aug 2008
- Working Papers
How Can Decision Making Be Improved?
While scholars can describe how people make decisions, and can envision how much better decision-making could be, they still have little understanding of how to help people overcome blind spots and behave optimally. Chugh, Milkman, and Bazerman organize the scattered knowledge that judgment and decision-making scholars have amassed over several decades about how to reduce biased decision-making. Their analysis of the existing literature on improvement strategies is designed to highlight the most promising avenues for future research. Read More
- 13 Aug 2008
- Research & Ideas
The Inner Life of Leaders
"Even when leaders try to hide and disguise their character, their traits are recognizable to others," says HBS professor emeritus Abraham Zaleznik. His new book, Hedgehogs and Foxes: Character, Leadership, and Command in Organizations, explores the internal complexities of people in control. Plus: Book excerpt. Read More
- 31 Jul 2008
- Working Papers
Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization
Coordination, and the communication it implies, is central to the very existence of organizations. Despite their fundamental role in the purpose of organizations, scholars have little understanding of actual interaction patterns in modern, complex, multiunit firms. To open the proverbial "black box" and begin to reveal the internal wiring of the firm, this paper presents a detailed, descriptive analysis of the network of communications among members of a large, structurally, functionally, geographically, and strategically diverse firm. The full data set comprises more than 100 million electronic mail messages and over 60 million electronic calendar entries for a sample of more 30,000 employees over a three-month period in 2006. Read More
- 11 Jun 2008
- Working Papers
Gender in Job Negotiations: A Two-Level Game
The traditional division of labor between the sexes—women managing the private realm and men the public—continues to have an indirect influence on job negotiation outcomes through links between private realm and public realm negotiations. Women's negotiations at work are often constrained by agreements in negotiations at home. There still remains a significant "unexplained" difference in male and female compensation that, according to research in the past several years, cannot be accounted for by gender differences in work commitment, education, and experience, or other considerations such as unionization. The literature on gender in negotiation may offer insights with regard to how negotiation contributes to or could help diminish gender differences in compensation. Bowles and McGinn review two bodies of literature on gender in negotiation—one from psychology and organizational behavior on candidate-employer negotiations, and another from economics and sociology on household bargaining over chores and child care. Read More
- 06 Jun 2008
- What Do YOU Think?
Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?
- 02 Jun 2008
- Research & Ideas
Spending on Happiness
Money can't buy you love but it can buy happiness—as long as it's money for someone else. New research by HBS professor Michael I. Norton and colleagues Elizabeth W. Dunn and Lara B. Aknin, described in the journal Science, looks into how and why spending money on others promotes happiness. Norton explains more in this Q&A. Read More
- 29 May 2008
- Working Papers
Some Neglected Axioms in Fair Division
This paper considers allocation and bargaining problems, and introduces conditions that one might expect fair procedures to satisfy. However, not all conditions one might hope for can be satisfied simultaneously. Furthermore, some apparently plausible and widely proposed axioms and procedures have consequences whose undesirability clearly goes far beyond what can be excused in this way. Thus pitfalls lurk in the field of fair division. Read More
- 28 Apr 2008
- HBS Cases
Negotiating with Wal-Mart
- 17 Apr 2008
- Working Papers
Diffusing Management Practices within the Firm: The Role of Information Provision
Managers face a range of options to diffuse innovative practices within their organizations. This paper focuses on one such technique: providing practice-specific information through mechanisms such as internal seminars, demonstrations, knowledge management systems, and promotional brochures. In contrast to corporate mandates, this "information provision" approach empowers facility managers to decide which practices to actually implement. The authors examine how corporate managers diffused advanced environmental management practices within technology manufacturing firms in the United States. The study identifies several factors that encourage corporate managers to employ information provision, including subsidiaries' related expertise, the extent to which the subsidiaries were diversified or concentrated in similar businesses, and the geographic dispersion of their employees. Read More
- 31 Mar 2008
- HBS Cases
JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day Crisis
- 13 Mar 2008
- Working Papers
An Investigation of Earnings Management through Marketing Actions
Earnings management behavior may be divided into two categories: 1) the opportunistic exercise of accounting discretion; and 2) the opportunistic structuring of real transactions. This paper focuses on the latter by providing evidence that managers use retail-level marketing actions (price discounts, feature advertisements, and aisle displays) to influence the timing of consumers' purchases in relation to their firms' fiscal calendars and financial performance. The results will be of interest to practitioners negotiating with suppliers as well as those responsible for setting price and promotion strategy in response to competitor actions, and practitioners responsible for designing incentive-based compensation as well as regulators monitoring reporting of fiscal period-ending promotion. Read More
- 15 Feb 2008
- Working Papers
Embracing Commitment and Performance: CEOs and Practices Used to Manage Paradox
How do chief executives establish strategic practices around their visions and intents? How do such practices make it possible to create both high commitment and high performance? The central puzzle for HBS professor emeritus Michael Beer and colleagues is not the creation of high commitment per se, but the kind of commitment that is useful for the implementation of strategy and sustainable performance. Beer et al. sought out major companies in North America and Europe that had a history of sustainable, above-average financial performance, and where there were indications of the companies being high-commitment organizations. They then conducted in-depth interviews with 26 CEOs of such companies, asking about activities and practices that help create commitment and performance. Read More
- 13 Feb 2008
- Working Papers
Unconventional Insights for Managing Stakeholder Trust
Most organizations understand the need to manage stakeholder trust. The bad news: Most organizations don't really understand how to manage the difficult job effectively. However, for those companies wishing to reap the benefits of improved cooperation with suppliers, increased motivation and productivity among employees, enhanced loyalty among customers, and higher levels of support from investors, managing stakeholder trust is a prudent, if not critical investment. Trust management may require an appreciation for some unconventional insights regarding the appropriate investment of resources. Stakeholders differ in regard to the kinds and degrees of vulnerability they face; what they need to believe before they will trust also differs. Would-be trust managers will be wise to consider these varying needs and to anticipate the tradeoffs that exist in strengthening relationships with specific stakeholders. Read More
- 08 Feb 2008
- Working Papers
Psychological Influence in Negotiation: An Introduction Long Overdue
This paper attempts to encourage a better dialogue between research on social influence and on negotiation. It provides an overview of the literature on both areas, and identifies opportunities for creating more effective and useful research. First, HBS professors Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman identify those elements of psychological influence that do not require the influencer to change the economic or structural aspects of the bargaining situation in order to persuade the target. Second, they review prior research on behavioral decision-making in negotiation to identify those ideas that may be relevant to influence in negotiation. Third, they provide a framework for thinking about how to leverage behavioral decision research to wield influence in negotiation. Fourth, they consider how targets of influence might defend against these tactics. Fifth, because psychological influence is, by definition, aimed at achieving one's own ends through the strategic manipulation of another's judgment, they consider the ethical issues surrounding its application in negotiation. Read More
- 22 Jan 2008
- Research & Ideas
New Challenges in Leading Professional Services
Professional service firms are being challenged as never before—by clients, associates, and the competition, just for starters. But old-style PSF leaders are not equipped to respond, says Harvard Business School professor Thomas J. DeLong. He discusses his new book When Professionals Have to Lead. Plus: Book excerpt. Read More
- 03 Jan 2008
- What Do YOU Think?
Does Judgment Trump Experience?
- 19 Nov 2007
- Lessons from the Classroom
Teaching The Moral Leader
In The Moral Leader course at Harvard Business School, students exchange their business management case studies to discuss some of the great protagonists in literature. Professor Sandra Sucher discusses how we all can find our own definition of moral leadership. Read More
- 14 Nov 2007
- Research & Ideas
Growing CEOs from the Inside
Who is the best CEO candidate? An insider with intimate knowledge of your company, or an outsider who is ready to put sacred cows out to pasture? The answer, says HBS professor Joseph L. Bower, is both. In this Q&A, he discusses his new book, The CEO Within, and why inside-outsiders are the key to succession planning. Read More
- 13 Nov 2007
- Research & Ideas
Six Steps for Reinvigorating America
In the early stages of the 21st century, America has lost its way both at home and in the world, argues Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter. In her new book, America the Principled, she details 6 opportunities for America to boost its economic vitality and democratic ideals. Q&A plus excerpt. Read More
- 08 Oct 2007
- Research & Ideas
Management Education’s Unanswered Questions
Managers want the status of professionals, but not all managers want the constraints that go along with professions. Why? For more than 100 years, business education at the top universities has been searching for its soul. HBS professor Rakesh Khurana, author of a new book, says business school education is at a turning point. Read More
- 04 Oct 2007
- What Do YOU Think?
Has Managerial Capitalism Peaked?
- 04 Oct 2007
- Working Papers
Fair (and Not So Fair) Division
"Fair" could be defined as what people of good will would want to be. This does not constitute an operational definition, however. This paper provides a specific procedure to calculate what could be considered fair and reasonable for various situations that require a fair division. A simple example would be a family that has inherited objects of artistic and/or sentimental value and wants to divide them up fairly while taking into account differences in taste. Laymen, mathematicians, and economists all have their own proposals for creating a fair division. Pratt suggests a procedure that, when put to the test of a range of examples, produces outcomes that accord with our intuitive sense of what is fair and desirable while previously proposed procedures do not. Read More
- 06 Sep 2007
- Working Papers
Why We Aren’t as Ethical as We Think We Are: A Temporal Explanation
People commonly predict that they will behave more ethically in the future than they actually do. When evaluating past (un)ethical behavior, they also believe they behaved more ethically than they actually did. These misperceptions, both of prediction and of recollection, have important ramifications for the distinction between how ethical we think we are and how ethical we really are, as well as understanding how such misperceptions are perpetuated over time. This paper draws on recent research in psychology and decision-making to gain insight into these forces. It also provides recommendations for reducing them. Read More
- 27 Aug 2007
- Views on News
Mattel: Getting a Toy Recall Right
- 02 Aug 2007
- What Do YOU Think?
How Will Millennials Manage?
- 28 Jun 2007
- Working Papers
Alignment in Cross-Functional and Cross-Firm Supply Chain Planning
Organizational behavior has become an increasingly important aspect of operations management. In this paper, alignment refers to an organization's sales and manufacturing groups working toward the same target for the sales of a particular product. What are the best conditions in supply chain planning for alignment across functions and across the firm? Kraiselburd and Watson push the frontier of theory with their use of mathematical modeling and game theory. They show that seemingly behavioral and psychological effects may still occur if both parties are rational profit maximizers in an economic sense. Read More
- 27 Jun 2007
- Executive Education
Learning to Make the Move to CEO
- 05 Jun 2007
- Working Papers
Leading and Creating Collaboration in Decentralized Organizations
No matter how a multi-divisional organization is designed, it will need to find effective ways for its units to spontaneously and responsively cross boundaries. This paper discusses 3 key barriers to collaboration and information-sharing within an organization, and offers 3 strategies to overcome them. Read More
- 14 May 2007
- Research & Ideas
The Key to Managing Stars? Think Team
Stars don't shine alone. As Harvard Business School's Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee reveal in new research, it is imperative that top performers as well as their managers take into account the quality of colleagues. Groysberg and Lee explain the implications for star mobility and retention in this Q&A. Read More
- 04 May 2007
- What Do YOU Think?
How Do Managers Think?
- 02 May 2007
- Research & Ideas
The Authentic Leader
Podcast: The best leaders are not the "follow me over the hill" type, says Professor Bill George. Rather, they're the people who lead from the heart as well as the head, and whose leadership style springs from their fundamental character and values. George discusses his new book True North, co-written with Peter Sims. Read More
- 25 Apr 2007
- Research & Ideas
Feeling Stuck? Getting Past Impasse
Feeling "stuck," as psychologically painful as it is, is the first step to awareness of new opportunities in career and in life, says Harvard Business School's Timothy Butler. In this Q&A and excerpt from his new book, Getting Unstuck, he explains six steps for getting from here to there. Read More
- 26 Mar 2007
- Research & Ideas
Learning from Failed Political Leadership
Strategic independence and better leadership assessment—these are the critical issues for both business and government in the future, says Professor D. Quinn Mills. In this Q&A he describes key lessons from his new book, Masters of Illusion, coauthored with Steven Rosefielde. A book excerpt follows. Read More
- 08 Feb 2007
- Working Papers
Managing Know-How
For many firms, the ability to create, organize, and disseminate know-how is a key factor in their ability to succeed. But should all companies engage in formal knowledge management? If not, which companies derive most value from a formal knowledge system? Conditional on implementing such a system, should the company focus more on learning from successes or learning from failures? Should such knowledge systems simply capture all experience, or should they be more selective? This paper develops and applies an economic framework to examine these questions. Read More
- 31 Jan 2007
- HBS Cases
When Good Teams Go Bad
- 10 Jan 2007
- HBS Cases
The Challenge of Managing National Security
What can we learn from mistakes made in managing national intelligence before 9/11? Professor Jan Rivkin discusses the difficulties of integrating a highly differentiated organization, and the dangers of overcentralizing decision making. From HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More
- 08 Jan 2007
- Research & Ideas
Who Rises to Power in American Business?
Business leaders in the United States have usually been white men who were blessed with the right religion, family, or education. But "outsiders" have also created their own paths to leadership, a trend on the rise today. Paths to Power is the first book in fifty years to exhaustively analyze the demographics of leadership and access in business in the U.S., and how the face of American leadership might be changing. A Q&A with Anthony J. Mayo. Read More
- 18 Dec 2006
- Executive Education
Grooming Next-Generation Leaders
- 15 Dec 2006
- Working Papers
The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community
IBM has contributed more than $1 billion to the development and promotion of the Linux operating system, and other vendors such as Sun are ramping up open source software efforts and investment. Why do information technology vendors that have traditionally sold proprietary software invest millions of dollars in OSS? Where have they chosen to invest, and what are the characteristics of the OSS projects to which they contribute? This study grouped OSS projects into clusters and identified IT vendors' motives in each cluster. Read More
- 11 Dec 2006
- Working Papers
Three Perspectives on Team Learning: Outcome Improvement, Task Mastery, and Group Process
Organizations increasingly rely on teams to carry out critical strategies and operational tasks. How do teams learn, and what factors are most important to team learning? This paper reports on current perspectives and findings that address these questions, looking at empirical studies on team learning from three areas of research: outcome improvement, task mastery, and group process. Overall, Edmondson and coauthors characterize the nature of research to date and assemble what is known and unknown about the theoretically and practically important topic of team learning. Read More
- 09 Nov 2006
- Research & Ideas
Andy Grove: A Biographer’s Tale
Podcast: For Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow, Intel co-founder Andy Grove is one of the most important and intriguing CEOs in American business history. In this interview, Tedlow discusses his new biography, Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American with Jim Aisner. Read More
- 03 Nov 2006
- Working Papers
Organizational Response to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box
How and why do organizations respond differently to pressures from different stakeholders? This question is central to organizational theory and feeds into strategic management research as well. Delmas and Toffel develop and test a model that describes why organizations respond differently to similar stakeholder pressures. They suggest that differences in how organizations distribute power across their internal corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different institutional pressures and thus adopt different management practices. Read More
- 30 Oct 2006
- Research & Ideas
The History and Influence of Andy Grove
In a soon-to-be-released biography, Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow profiles one of the most influential business leaders of our time—Intel's Andy Grove. Tedlow discusses his research on the Silicon Valley legend and how Grove altered much more than the chip industry. Read More
- 02 Oct 2006
- Research & Ideas
Negotiating in Three Dimensions
"Negotiation is increasingly a way of life for effective managers," say HBS professor James Sebenius and colleague David Lax. Their new book, 3-D Negotiation, describes how you can shape important deals through tactics, deal design, and set-up, and why three dimensions are more powerful than one. Here's a Q&A and book excerpt. Read More
- 01 Sep 2006
- What Do YOU Think?
Are We Ready for Self-Management?
- 14 Aug 2006
- HBS Cases
On Managing with Bobby Knight and “Coach K”
- 31 Jul 2006
- Research & Ideas
When Not to Trust Your Gut
- 29 May 2006
- Research & Ideas
Why CEOs Are Not Plug-and-Play
- 17 Apr 2006
- Research & Ideas
Resisting the Seductions of Success
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Papers
Deep Links: Business School Students’ Perceptions of the Role of Law and Ethics in Business
The researchers spent more than a year eliciting twelve MBA students' thoughts and feelings about the role of law in starting and running a U.S. business. This research offers new insights into the ongoing debate about how best to educate the business leaders of tomorrow. More than a standalone course in business law or ethics, it would be wise for educators to use an approach that treats the role of law and business in the broader context of societal needs and norms. Read More
- 27 Feb 2006
- Research & Ideas
Corporate Values and Employee Cynicism
A values-driven organization poses unique risks for its leaders—in particular, charges of hypocrisy if the leaders make a mistake. Sandra Cha of McGill University and Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School discuss what to do when values backfire. Read More
- 27 Feb 2006
- Research & Ideas
When Rights of First Refusal Are a Bad Deal
Contracts that include a right of first refusal usually benefit the holder of that right. But not always. New research by professor Alvin E. Roth and colleague Brit Grosskopf explains when it's wise to say no. Read More
- 20 Feb 2006
- HBS Cases
Oprah: A Case Study Comes Alive
- 13 Feb 2006
- Research & Ideas
When Gender Changes the Negotiation
- 30 Jan 2006
- Research & Ideas
Looking Behind Bad Decisions
In a recent HBS Working Paper, HBS professor Max Bazerman and colleagues explore how biases and human psychology impede policy-making efforts that could vastly improve people's lives. Read More
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Papers
Maximizing Joint Gains: Transaction Utility Within and Between Groups
Win-win deals are more easily described than carried out. Earlier studies have shown that when people don't know the gender or social category of their negotiating partner, they are happy to make a profit even if their partner earns a greater profit. Four new studies looked at how gender or other social contexts influence the way people cut a deal. Read More
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Papers
Effects of Task Difficulty on Use of Advice
We make most of our choices by weighing other people's advice counter to our own opinions. People generally underweight advice from others, though the practice is not universal. In two studies, it is determined that people overweight advice on difficult tasks but underweight it on the easy ones. Read More
- 26 Sep 2005
- Research & Ideas
What Perceived Power Brings to Negotiations
What role does "perceived power" play in negotiations? For one thing, it may help all the parties take away a win at the table. Professor Kathleen McGinn discusses new research done with Princeton’s Rebecca Wolf. Read More
- 01 Aug 2005
- Research & Ideas
How to Choose the Best Deal
- 27 Jun 2005
- Research & Ideas
The Potential Downside of Win-Win
- 06 Jun 2005
- Research & Ideas
Don’t Listen to “Yes”
It's essential for leaders to spark conflict in their organizations, as long as it is constructive. A Q&A with Professor Michael Roberto, author of the new book Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer. Read More
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Papers
Governance and CEO Turnover: Do Something or Do the Right Thing?
CEOs who become "entrenched" by the board of directors can gain an extra buffer between themselves and angry shareholders. Entrenchment has potential costs (a poorly performing CEO hangs on to the job) but also benefits (the board can deflect shareholder cries for dismissal of a CEO who was merely unlucky). The authors hope to shift the emphasis of the debate on entrenchment to a consideration of these tradeoffs and to shift the focus of the entrenchment-performance discussion toward the decisions, such as CEO dismissal, that are directly tied to the actions of the board. Read More
- 21 Feb 2005
- Op-Ed
Is Business Management a Profession?
- 07 Feb 2005
- What Do YOU Think?
If You Blink, Will You Miss?
- 10 Jan 2005
- Research & Ideas
How to Put Meaning Back into Leading
When research on leadership pays more attention to financial results than a person's ability to give the company a sense of purpose, something crucial is lost. Three Harvard Business School scholars are working to change the debate. A Q&A with Joel M. Podolny, Rakesh Khurana, and Marya Hill-Popper. Read More
- 13 Dec 2004
- Research & Ideas
How Leaders Create Winning Streaks
- 13 Dec 2004
- Research & Ideas
Sharing News That Might Be Bad
- 01 Nov 2004
- Research & Ideas
The New CEO’s Wrong Message
- 25 Oct 2004
- Research & Ideas
Planning for Surprises
A company doesn't need a crystal ball to see impending disasters. Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman and INSEAD professor Michael D. Watkins explain how to foresee and avoid predictable surprises. Read More
- 27 Sep 2004
- Research & Ideas
IBM Finds Profit in Diversity
- 27 Sep 2004
- Research & Ideas
How Leaders Build Winning Streaks
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Papers
Do We Listen to Advice Just Because We Paid for It? The Impact of Cost of Advice on Its Use
People make decisions every day by weighing their own opinions with advice from other sources. But do we know whether people use advice in a way that is helpful to them? In two experiments performed under controlled, laboratory conditions, Gino found that all else being equal, people weigh advice differently according to the amount of money they pay for it. Also, the cost of advice affects the degree to which people use it. Read More
- 26 Jul 2004
- Research & Ideas
A Better Way to Negotiate: Backward
- 07 Jun 2004
- What Do YOU Think?
How Important are Big Ideas?
- 31 May 2004
- Research & Ideas
How Team Leaders Show Support–or Not
What does a team leader do so that employees know they are being supported? A Q&A with HBS professor and creativity expert Teresa Amabile about new research. Read More
- 24 May 2004
- Research & Ideas
Becoming an Ethical Negotiator
Think you negotiate fairly? Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler and colleague Carrie Menkel-Meadow have co-edited a new book, What’s Fair: Ethics for Negotiators. Here’s a Q&A. Read More
- 24 May 2004
- Research & Ideas
The Watsons: IBM’s Troubled Legacy
- 12 Apr 2004
- Research & Ideas
Waking Up a Sleeping Company
- 12 Apr 2004
- Research & Ideas
What Great American Leaders Teach Us
A new database on great American leaders offers surprising insights on the nature of leadership. A Q&A with Tony Mayo, executive director of the Harvard Business School Leadership Initiative. Read More
- 22 Dec 2003
- Research & Ideas
Negotiation and All That Jazz
- 15 Dec 2003
- Research & Ideas
The New Global Business Manager
What are the critical skills global managers need today compared to ten years ago? An interview with Harvard Business School professor Christopher A. Bartlett. Read More
- 15 Dec 2003
- Research & Ideas
Women Leaders and Organizational Change
Merely expanding the number of women in leadership roles does not automatically induce organizational change. Harvard professor Robin Ely and Debra Meyerson call for fundamental changes to transform organizations. Read More
- 08 Dec 2003
- Research & Ideas
Is That Really Your Best Offer?
- 10 Nov 2003
- Research & Ideas
A Fast Start on Your New Job
Your first ninety days in a new position are fraught with peril—and loaded with opportunity. HBS professor Michael Watkins explains how to get a running start. A Q&A and book excerpt. Read More
- 13 Oct 2003
- Research & Ideas
Negotiating Challenges for Women Leaders
When negotiating compensation, women often sell themselves short. Some practical advice on claiming the power to lead in this interview with HBS professor Kathleen L. McGinn and Harvard's Hannah Riley Bowles. Read More
- 04 Aug 2003
- Research & Ideas
Shackleton: An Entrepreneur of Survival
Polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton is the subject of a new HBS case study. Professor Nancy F. Koehn discusses lessons for leaders from the voyage of the Endurance. Read More
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Papers
Geographically-Colocated Subgroups in Globally Dispersed Teams: A Test of the Faultline Hypothesis
Team diversity can harness strengths or drive a team apart. Troublesome faultlines appear when team members identify with a subgroup more strongly than with the larger team. Previous research, conducted on teams who worked face-to-face, has shown that these faultlines can be based on demographic factors (such as differences in nationality). The authors of this paper conducted a study on faultlines that arise between subgroups in different geographic locations. They found that faultline dynamics did indeed occur in teams with subgroups in different locations, and that their geographic diversity caused disruptive group relations, diminished trust, and increased conflict between subgroups. Read More
- 30 Jun 2003
- Research & Ideas
Are You Supporting Your B Players?
- 23 Jun 2003
- Research & Ideas
Psychology, Pathology, and the CEO
- 05 May 2003
- Research & Ideas
Sharing the Responsibility of Corporate Governance
Is business malfeasance always the board's fault? HBS professor Constance Bagley argues that everyone has a stake in ethical behavior and moral reasoning. Read More
- 07 Apr 2003
- Research & Ideas
Three Steps for Crisis Prevention
- 07 Apr 2003
- Research & Ideas
How the U.S. Army Develops Leaders
Leadership development in the U.S. Army has ramifications beyond American borders. In this e-mail interview, HBS professor Scott A. Snook, a retired Army colonel, describes how military leaders grow. Plus: Book excerpt Read More
- 03 Mar 2003
- Research & Ideas
The Ingredients of a Deal Disaster
- 20 Jan 2003
- Views on News
Fixing Corporate Governance: A Roundtable Discussion at Harvard Business School
Bad business practices on a huge scale have made corporate governance Topic A of late. In a roundtable discussion, Harvard Business School professors Krishna Palepu, Jay Lorsch, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Nancy Koehn, Brian Hall, and Paul Healy explore guidelines for change. Read More
- 18 Nov 2002
- Research & Ideas
Where Morals and Profits Meet: The Corporate Value Shift
Although recent headlines focus on business boondoggles, HBS professor Lynn S. Paine's research shows a rising standard of corporate performance that includes moral and financial dimensions. In an interview, she details this trend and her new book, Value Shift. Read More
- 16 Sep 2002
- Research & Ideas
The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs
Companies reflexively look to charismatic CEOs to save them, and that's a bad idea, says HBS professor Rakesh Khurana. In this excerpt from his new book and in an e-mail interview with HBS Working Knowledge, he explains how the CEO cult arose. Read More
- 29 Jul 2002
- Research & Ideas
Get Off the Dime!
- 10 Jun 2002
- Research & Ideas
Reinventing the Industrial Giant
- 10 Jun 2002
- Research & Ideas
Disruption: The Art of Framing
- 03 Jun 2002
- Research & Ideas
How to Succeed With Your New Boss
- 13 May 2002
- Research & Ideas
Bringing the Master Passions to Work
- 22 Apr 2002
- Research & Ideas
Does Spirituality Drive Success?
- 11 Feb 2002
- Research & Ideas
The Quiet Leader—and How to Be One
Think of a business leader and who comes to mind? A brash type like Jack Welch? But real leaders solve tough problems in all kinds of ways, and often quietly, says Harvard Business School's Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr. Read More
- 12 Nov 2001
- Research & Ideas
Can Religion and Business Learn From Each Other?
Do religion and business have anything to say to each other? HBS senior research fellow Laura Nash believes they do. Read More
- 15 Oct 2001
- Research & Ideas
Rethinking E-Leadership
- 10 Sep 2001
- What Do YOU Think?
Do MBAs Need More Street Smarts?
- 02 Apr 2001
- Research & Ideas
What Makes a Good Leader?
- 12 Mar 2001
- Research & Ideas
Evolving for Success [Part Two]
Grappling with rapid change is one of the greatest challenges facing companies now, says HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She tells how companies can forge ahead in part two of an interview about her new book, Evolve!:Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow. Read More
- 26 Feb 2001
- Research & Ideas
Evolving for Success [Part One]
In part one of an interview about her latest book, Evolve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow, HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter talks about how companies can get ahead, now and in the future. Read More
- 06 Nov 2000
- What Do YOU Think?
Succession at GE: What’s Next?
- 23 May 2000
- Research & Ideas