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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      Cold Call
      A podcast featuring faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart.
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      • 19 Jan 2021
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Engaging Community to Create Proactive, Equitable Public Safety

      Saint Paul, Minnesota Mayor Melvin Carter swept into office in 2018 promising equity. He wanted a new public safety framework that would be rooted in community. Then, with the COVID-19 pandemic wiping out much of the city’s budget and the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a police officer in neighboring Minneapolis sparking calls to defund the police, how would Mayor Carter make these changes happen? Professor Mitch Weiss discusses the challenges and rewards of “possibility government” in his case, "Community-First Public Safety."  Open for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

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      Interpersonal CommunicationRemove Interpersonal Communication →

      Page 1 of 32 Results →
      • 29 Sep 2020
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Employee Performance vs. Company Values: A Manager’s Dilemma

      Re: Nitin Nohria

      The Cold Call podcast celebrate its five-year anniversary with a classic case study. Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria discusses the dilemma of how to treat a brilliant individual performer who can't work with colleagues. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 28 Sep 2020
      • Research & Ideas

      How Leaders Can Navigate Politicized Conversations and Inspire Collaboration

      by Kristen Senz

      Francesca Gino discusses the psychology of conversation in politicized workplaces and how managers can improve their conversation styles to create high-quality collaboration. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 20 Feb 2020
      • Op-Ed

      Love in the Office Is Wonderful. Except for CEOs.

      by Regina Herzlinger

      Finding love among your office colleagues can be a wonderful thing, and not inevitably career ending. Unless, of course, you are the CEO. Advice to the corporate lovelorn from Regina Herzlinger. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 10 Feb 2020
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Fostering Perceptions of Authenticity via Sensitive Self-Disclosure

      by Li Jiang, Maryam Kouchaki, Francesca Gino, Reihane Boghrati, and Leslie John

      By making sensitive self-disclosures, leaders can enhance how authentic their followers perceive them to be, leading to positive interpersonal outcomes and potentially organizational ones as well. Aside from the obvious costs of disclosing weaknesses, leaders may also reap surprising benefits from doing so.

      • 14 Jan 2020
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Engineering Serendipity: The Role of Cognitive Similarity in Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Production

      by Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan, and Karim R. Lakhani

      By creating opportunities for cross-disciplinary scientists to meet and talk as part of a natural field experiment, this study analyzes and finds evidence for a systematic relationship between knowledge sharing and knowledge production in the sciences. Findings may extend to similar types of cross-disciplinary knowledge-sharing opportunities in other settings.

      • 02 Dec 2019
      • What Do You Think?

      How Does a Company like Boeing Respond to Intense Competitive Pressure?

      by James Heskett

      SUMMING UP: Playing out in real time, Boeing's misguided responses to competitive pressure illustrate organizational "gaps" suffered by many organizations. James Heskett's readers discuss solutions. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 17 Sep 2019
      • Cold Call Podcast

      How a New Leader Broke Through a Culture of Accuse, Blame, and Criticize

      Re: Amy C. Edmondson

      Children’s Hospital & Clinics COO Julie Morath sets out to change the culture by instituting a policy of blameless reporting, which encourages employees to report anything that goes wrong or seems substandard, without fear of reprisal. Professor Amy Edmondson discusses getting an organization into the “High Performance Zone.” Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 02 May 2019
      • Sharpening Your Skills

      How To Ask Better Questions

      by Kristen Senz

      To make the best decisions, managers must ask the right questions. This collection of past studies by Harvard Business School researchers will help you gather the critical information needed to prepare for action. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 26 Mar 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact

      by Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell

      Firms increasingly deploy self-service technologies (SSTs) to manage customer interfaces that are inherently stressful. For example, patients may be asked to use kiosks to check themselves into hospitals. This study finds that customer anxiety during SST transactions can reduce customers’ trust in the service provider. Operational design choices may help.

      • 11 Feb 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Gender Stereotypes in Deliberation and Team Decisions

      by Katherine B. Coffman, Clio Bryant Flikkema, and Olga Shurchkov

      Professional success requires the ability to contribute ideas, and receive credit for them. This paper explores gender differences in how men and women communicate and reward each other in team decision-making problems. We find that women are recognized less often for their contributions in male-typed domains.

      • 12 Nov 2018
      • Research & Ideas

      'Always On' Isn't Always Best for Team Decision-Making

      by Roberta Holland

      Is it possible for teams to communicate too frequently? Research by Ethan Bernstein and colleagues suggests that groups that meet less often may be better at problem-solving. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 11 Apr 2018
      • Research & Ideas

      Sexual Harassment: What Employers Should Do Now

      by Dina Gerdeman

      Organizations are realizing they are not doing enough to stop the inappropriate behavior that can lead to an awkward office environment, lawsuits, and reputation damage. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 18 Mar 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Thanks for Nothing: Expressing Gratitude Invites Exploitation by Competitors

      by Jeremy Yip, Kelly Kiyeon Lee, Cindy Chan, and Alison Wood Brooks

      Think more carefully and strategically about expressing gratitude while negotiations are still underway. Even if negotiators feel grateful for concessions from a counterpart, it may not help them, and it might even hurt them, to express it then and there. Wait until the deal is done before saying thanks.

      • 16 Mar 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Amount and Diversity of Digital Emotional Expression Predicts Happiness

      by Laura Vuillier, Alison Wood Brooks, June Gruber, Rui Sun, Michael I. Norton, Matthew James Samson, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Paul Piff, Sarah Fan, Jordi Quoidbach, Charles Gorintin, Pete Fleming, Arturo Bejar, and Dacher Keltner

      Emoticons might seem trivial because they require just the tap of a finger, but this study shows how emoticons make a difference in overall emotion expression. People use emoticons to highlight the emotions they intend to convey, and emoticons also serve as predictors—and causes—of happiness and well-being.

      • 15 Mar 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Backhanded Compliments: How Negative Comparisons Undermine Flattery

      by Ovul Sezer, Alison Wood Brooks, and Michael I. Norton

      Backhanded compliments seem like praise but can leave a sting. This study explores the psychology of backhanded compliments. Flatterers deploy backhanded compliments to garner liking while conveying social status. Recipients view praise of this kind as strategic put-downs and penalize would-be flatterers even as the backhanded compliment undermines their motivation and perseverance.

      • 04 May 2017
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Leading a Team to the Top of Mount Everest

      Re: Amy C. Edmondson

      In a podcast, Amy Edmondson describes how students learn about team communication and decision making by making a simulated climb up Mount Everest. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 02 May 2016
      • Research & Ideas

      Why People Don’t Vote--and How a Good Ground Game Helps

      by Michael Blanding

      Recent research by Vincent Pons shows that campaigners knocking on the doors of potential voters not only improves overall turnout but helps individual candidates win more of those votes. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 11 Feb 2016
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France

      by Vincent Pons

      A countrywide field experiment conducted during François Hollande's door-to-door campaign for the 2012 French presidential election finds that one-on-one discussions with campaigners have strong potential to shift people's decisions even when the principal's control on campaign agents is limited. The implications reach beyond political campaigns to persuasive communication directed at consumers, donors, or investors.

      • 11 Feb 2016
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy

      by Vincent Pons

      Elections in established democracies regularly attract less than half of the voting-age population. This low electoral participation raises concerns for the overall legitimacy and stability of the democratic regimes. This study of a mid-sized city in northern Italy during the 2014 municipal elections finds that while volunteers’ visits increased participation by a significant 1.8 percentage points, surprisingly the candidates’ own visits affected neither the average voter nor any subgroup of the population, whether defined by age, gender, place of birth, or turnout history.

      • 16 Mar 2015
      • Research & Ideas

      Advice on Advice

      by Dina Gerdeman

      To be effective leaders, we all need good advice, and we need to give good advice to others. Problem is, advice sharing is not as easy as it sounds, explain Joshua Margolis and the late David Garvin. Open for comment; 14 Comment(s) posted.

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