Theory →
- 11 Dec 2006
- Working Paper Summaries
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. Key concepts include: Team learning has value for organizations; learning in teams is seen as a key mechanism through which learning organizations become strategically and operationally adaptive and responsive. Research on team learning is at a crossroads. How the learning of individual work teams translates into organizational learning is not well understood, and management literature to date offers few insights. One avenue for future research is the durability and utility of team-based networks for the organization as a whole. Learning in teams almost necessarily plays a role in developing the knowledge and skills of individuals who compose the team. Another avenue for future research is how individuals benefit from their team learning experiences in terms of intellectual, career, and personal development goals. Organizations stand to benefit when ideas are cross-fertilized and diverse individuals learn to work together. "Outsiders" can introduce valuable ideas. Learning and execution are often at odds: Learning by its nature involves uncertainty, false starts, and occasional dead ends. Team learning in organizations must be recognized as a strategy for tolerating forays into the unknown. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 27 Nov 2006
- Research & Ideas
Manly Men, Oil Platforms, and Breaking Stereotypes
Men who work in dangerous places often act invulnerable to prove their merit as workers and as men—objectives that can lead to decreased safety and efficiency. Professor Robin Ely and her team helicoptered to offshore oil platforms in order to understand "manly men" and how working environments can be changed to alter men's enactments of manhood. Key concepts include: Men's masculine identity (like women's feminine identity) is a profoundly social and cultural phenomenon. In dangerous, male-dominated work settings, men's tendency to gain respect by demonstrating and defending their masculinity is costly. Efforts to appear invulnerable block precisely the kinds of actions that encourage safety and effectiveness. Offshore oil platforms, although male dominated, are also improving safety dramatically. Rather than seeking to prove how tough, proficient, and cool-headed they are, platform workers purposefully make themselves vulnerable in order to perform their jobs more safely and effectively. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 18 Oct 2006
- Working Paper Summaries
Racial Diversity Initiatives in Professional Service Firms: What Factors Differentiate Successful from Unsuccessful Initiatives?
What organizational factors are needed for racial diversity initiatives to succeed? While diversity continues to grow in importance in organizations, very little research has focused on the processes that underlie diversity management. Modupe Akinola and David A. Thomas propose a study intended to explore management initiatives that focus on racial diversity in professional service firms. Given that such firms rely on the high level of skills, expertise, and diverse perspectives offered by their professional staff, these firms may be ideal laboratories for examining diversity initiatives. Key concepts include: The success of diversity initiatives in professional service firms is driven by five criteria: a well articulated and widely bought-into diversity strategy, leadership support, an engaged employee base, innovative approaches to recruiting and retaining minorities, and management practices that are integrated and aligned with the initiative. Firms that achieve sustained success in their diversity initiatives should show evidence of more of these success criteria relative to their peers in the same industries. Organizations with a strong understanding of the factors that influence the success of diversity initiatives may begin to better recruit and retain minorities. Such insights may even extend to organizational practices unrelated to diversity. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 28 Aug 2006
- Research & Ideas
Online Match-Making with Virtual Dates
Users of online dating sites often struggle to find love because the sites themselves make it more difficult than it needs to be. To the rescue: Virtual Dates, an online ice-breaker from Jeana Frost of Boston University, Michael Norton of HBS, and Dan Ariely of MIT. Key concepts include: Technology influences the tone and trajectory of relationships. The interface of online dating sites should be improved to help people filter better. Virtual Dates is an experimental interface that allows couples to communicate in real time using colors, words, and images. The idea of virtual spaces for natural interactions may have applications for managers and entrepreneurs. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Paper Summaries
Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing
Activity-based costing (ABC) has become popular in business writing and management circles. (An example of an activity would be process customer complaints.) However, calculating baselines for activities, developing the model, and retesting the model once it is implemented is time-consuming and costly. Kaplan and Anderson developed improvements in the process through what they call time-driven ABC. Time-driven ABC decreases the amount of data needed, and only requires estimates of two things: (1) the practical capacity of committed resources and their cost, and (2) unit times for performing transactional activities. Key concepts include: Building an accurate time-based algorithm in one facility will typically serve as a template that can be easily applied and customized to other plants, or even other companies in an industry. Time-driven ABC requires less time and resources to implement. At one company cited, it took two people two days per month to load, calculate, validate, and report findings, compared to the ten-person team spending over three weeks to maintain the previous (traditional ABC) model. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Paper Summaries
Empirical Tests of Information Aggregation
While neither buyers nor sellers may be certain of the worth of used goods, both may possess private information about the value. Do prices become more informative as the number of bidders grows? Using data from a sample of eBay auctions for computers, Yin looked at how and under what conditions auction prices converge to the common value of a given item. Key concepts include: Ebay prices do become more meaningful as the number of bidders increases; however, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that they aggregate information as fully as they could, given the number of bidders. Even partial information aggregation by eBay auction prices suggests a potential efficiency gain over one-to-one trade of used goods with uncertain common values Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 05 Jul 2006
- Working Paper Summaries
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. Key concepts include: Understand built-in biases when weighing advice, especially on difficult tasks. Don't automatically give more credence to the opinions of advisers or consultants over your own experience. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 08 May 2006
- Research & Ideas
The Cost of Cutting in Line
Harvard Business School faculty rarely put their personal safety at risk to prove a point, but Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee came close when he cut ahead in line—all in the name of science. Here's what companies can learn about long lines and social behavior. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 12 Mar 2006
- Research & Ideas
New Research Explores Multi-Sided Markets
Dating clubs, credit cards, and video games are all examples of multi-sided markets, where firms need to get two or more distinct groups of customers on the same platform. Professor Andrei Hagiu discusses this new field of business research—and why it matters to you. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 31 Oct 2004
- What Do You Think?
Should the Wisdom of Crowds Influence Our Thinking About Leadership?
New research suggests that large groups of people are better than a few experts at everything from estimating the true magnitude of things to diagnosing causes of problems to predicting outcomes. If this is correct, what does it say about the true nature of effective leadership? Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 23 Jun 2003
- Research & Ideas
Psychology, Pathology, and the CEO
In difficult times, organizational pathologies can cause a death spiral. Here’s how the CEO can win back the hearts and minds of staff, according to HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 09 Dec 2002
- Research & Ideas
Most Accountants Aren’t CrooksWhy Good Audits Go Bad
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act sets stiff penalties for auditors and executives who commit fraud. Problem is, says Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman and his collaborators, most bad audits are the result of unconscious bias, not corruption. Here's a new look at how to audit the auditors. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 30 Sep 2002
- Research & Ideas
Use the Psychology of Pricing To Keep Customers Returning
When to charge for a product or service can be more important than how much to charge, says Harvard Business School professor John Gourville. If you want to build long-term loyalty with customers, you better understand the difference. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 09 Oct 2001
- Research & Ideas
Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organizations
Exclusive! In this first look at a new book, HBS professors Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria explore how human nature shapes business organizations. Does your organization reflect the four basic human drives? Plus: Q&A. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 24 Jul 2000
- Research & Ideas
Value Maximization and Stakeholder Theory
Many managers, says HBS Professor Michael C. Jensen, are caught in a dilemma: between a desire to maximize the value of their companies and the demands of "stakeholder theory" to take into account the interests of all the stakeholders in a firm. The way out of the conflict, says Jensen, lies in a new way of measuring value. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 05 Jun 2000
- What Do You Think?
- 15 Feb 2000
- Research & Ideas
The Right Connections
In attracting funding for a new venture, report HBS Professor Monica Higgins and her colleague Ranjay Gulati of Northwestern University, professional ties and company connections are even more important than a good product in inspiring the trust and loosening the wallets of potential investors. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
A Quantity-Driven Theory of Term Premia and Exchange Rates
This paper provides a framework for understanding how the detailed structure of financial intermediation affects foreign exchange rates.
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Future Lock-in: Or, I’ll Agree to Do the Right Thing...Next Week
Most of us believe that we should make certain choices—save more money or reduce gas consumption, for example—but we do not want to carry out these choices. In psychology this tension has been referred to as a "want/should" conflict. Rogers and Bazerman show through four experiments that people are more likely to choose what they believe they should choose when the choice will be implemented in the future rather than in the present, a tendency they call "future lock-in." They also discuss directions for future research and applications for public policy, an arena in which citizens are often asked to consider binding policies that trade short-term interests for long-term benefits. Key concepts include: Tension occurs between an individual's immediate self-interest and the interests of all others, including his or her own "future self." Individuals tend to think that their future selves will behave more virtuously than their present selves. Four studies demonstrated the future lock-in effect, which describes a person's increased willingness to choose and support a binding "should-choice" when it is to be implemented in the future rather than in the present. Policymakers could leverage the benefits of future lock-in by advocating for reforms that would be decided upon in the present, but go into effect in the future. Future lock-in would encourage citizens to more heavily weight a policy's abstract merits rather than its concrete costs. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.