3605 Posts Found

Accountability entails being answerable to another person for a product, process, or result that is measurable in terms of quantity, quality, and time. When reviewing an employee’s role in an accountable system, three key questions should be asked: First, why does the job exist? Does it ultimately add value for the customers? (By “customers” we mean anyone who benefits from the organization’s work or products, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Brian Dive | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Accountability, Organizational Behavior

We study how the degree of organizational complexity of a firm relates to its corporate financial policies. We measure complexity as the number of layers in the firm’s subsidiary structure, and focus on a sample of US firms over the period 1996-2006. We argue that organizational complexity makes the firm opaque and increases the asymmetry of information between it and the market. We show that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alberto Manconi, Massimo Massa | Source: Social Science Research Network (SSRN) | Subjects: Finance, Organizational Behavior

Title inflation is an easy move that makes everyone happy, one with few costs other than a couple of boxes of new business cards. Right?

Wrong. Companies have employed this seemingly harmless strategy since they began etching executives’ names on office doors, and all the evidence points to very real and negative results.

Content: Article | Author: Warren Rosenstein | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

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A survey across 163 countries by Professor Roger Steare found that people divide into six types of moral profile, each with a discrete ethicability.

Content: Article | Authors: Carol Lewis, Roger Steare | Sources: Cass Business School, The Economist | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Gratitude has received little serious attention in the literature on job attitudes. This may be because most people see it as a spontaneous emotional response to an external event. But University of California psychologist Robert Emmons makes a compelling argument that gratitude is better thought of as a discipline or a skill, more akin to goal-setting or time management, rather than simply another dimension of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: E. L. Kersten | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Attitude, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

You can tell the caliber of a person by the amount of opposition it takes to discourage him or her.

Content: Quotation | Author: John Maxwell | Subject: Personality / Behavior

Our relationship with money has many facets. Some people seem addicted to accumulating it, while others can’t help maxing out their credit cards and find it impossible to save for a rainy day. As we come to understand more about money’s effect on us, it is emerging that some people’s brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to others it … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mark Buchanan | Source: New Scientist | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior

You are not talented at your job. You never will be. But wait: That’s the good news—because talent, argues Geoff Colvin, doesn’t exist in the first place—at least not in the traditional sense of the word. It is not, he points out, an innate ability. The sooner you realize that Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and you were not meant to be great business … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Geoffrey Colvin, Vadim Liberman | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

In recovering from a crisis, ethical business practice and high performance aren’t opposed.

Content: Article | Author: Art Kleiner | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Ethics

Threatened egotism occurs when people or events undermine an individual’s high but unstable self-esteem. It doesn’t affect those with a stable self-esteem, since external threats are unlikely to faze such people. And those with a low self-esteem are unsusceptible to threatened egotism because external threats simply reinforce already low self-perceptions.

Millennials, then, are especially vulnerable to threatened egotism, because their inflated self-perceptions are generally grounded in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: E. L. Kersten | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

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. Q&A.

Content: Article | Authors: Max H. Bazerman, Sean Silverthorne | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Who’d have thought fighting with each other would be good for employees? Or that ignoring superiors would be a wise business practice? Sutton, consultant and professor at the Stanford Engineering School, advocates taking a nontraditional approach to innovation and management in this quirky business manual. He advises taking unorthodox actions, suggesting managers should forget the past, especially successes; hire people who make them uncomfortable and … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Robert I. Sutton | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Are you an enforcer, philosopher, judge, angel, teacher or guardian? Find out the composition of your moral DNA with our test.

Content: Online Resource | Author: Roger Steare | Source: The Times | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

The most surprising thing was that if terrorists rolled a hand grenade down the middle of a room, all our CIA employees would jump out of their seats and throw their bodies on it to protect everyone else. They would all give up their lives for one another and their country. However, if someone ran into the room and said, ‘I need someone to make … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gilman Louie | Source: The Wilson Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Although the cost of excessive caution is harder to measure than that of recklessness, it is no less real.

Content: Quotation | Source: The Wilson Quarterly | Subjects: Achievement, Management, Organizational Behavior

There is a growing set of research that shows “learning or mastery” goals have much more positive effects on performance and internal motivation than “performance” goals.

Content: Quotation | Author: Max H. Bazerman | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Goals, Organizational Behavior

Achieving competitive success through people involves fundamentally altering how we think about the workforce and the employment relationship. It means achieving success by working with people, not by replacing them or limiting the scope of their activities. It entails seeing the workforce as a source of strategic advantage, not just as a cost to be minimized or avoided. Firms that take this different perspective are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: Academy of Management Executive | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Despite evidence that ambitious goal setting can hurt productivity, damage a company’s reputation and violate ethical standards, its use has become endemic in American business practice and scholarship, even spilling over to the debate on how to improve America’s public schools. A new paper by Wharton operations and information management professor Maurice E. Schweitzer and three co-authors documents the hazards of corporate goal setting and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Adam Galinsky, Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice Schweitzer, Max H. Bazerman | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

British journalist Jeffreys (Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug) presents a compelling account of the comprehensive collaboration of Germany’s major chemical conglomerate with Adolf Hitler’s genocidal dictatorship. The fourth largest industrial concern in the world, IG Farben was a key element of German foreign policy. Its employees were well treated. Its scientists won Nobel prizes. Its administrators created an international network controlling the … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Diarmuid Jeffreys | Subjects: Ethics, History, Social Responsibility (ESG)